* sponga — Hebrew slang for sponging the floor

«If only you knew out of what trash poems grow»…
© Tsvetaeva


With some of my works I feel like a dj, mixin everything I like in one place. Here a pumpkin by Kusama Yayoi, one of my favorite Japanese Artists, can be easily recognised:


source

But this work actually is inspired by another artist, Boris Kustodiev. He worked in the beginning of 20th century in Russia, drawing festivities, fairs, bazars and happy life of the middle class, known as a talented, but a «bad taste» artist. His worked considered often as too sweet, to decorative and looked often more like illustrations that as a serious art. Kustodiev told about his works, that they should’n be seen as naturalistic, but as illustrations of an illusionary world he created from natural elements.

He made series of merchant’s wives (The first one is my favorite):


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I take part in Documenta 1, the multi-art exhibition in Froots gallery in Shanghai, and I was asked to tell some stories behind my art. Sometimes when I tell my stories people are disappointed, because they have their own stories and connections. So I usually more curious to ask what the visitors feel and think about my works without giving any clear answer. But sometimes I do share my inspirations, and here are some of them:

Demon, sitting.

…He wandered, now long-since outcast;
his desert had no refuge in it:
and one by one the ages passed,
as minute follows after minute,
each one monotonously dull.
The world he ruled was void and null;
the ill he sowed in his existence
brought no delight. His technique scored,
he found no traces of resistance —
yet evil left him deeply bored.«
(M. Y. Lermontov „Demon“)

This is my homage to Russian artist Mikhail Vrubel’s work „The Demon Sitting“. It used to be my favorite painting when I was 13. I am not sure why, but I liked that this strong, handsome and full of power Demon can be sad, quiet and almost crying. Vrubel was a symbolist. Symbolism was an art movement in the beginning of XX century. Symbolists (very briefly) wanted to show some comlicated feelings and emotions. They took archetypal characters that already has meaning for most of the people (like demon, angel, princess, knight etc) and show the feelings on them.


Demon, Sitting

My Demon is a Black Fox. I use this character in other paintings, and this is how I imagine Don Juan. My Black Fox comes to lonely women and seduces them. But he also has his moments of loneliness and sadness…


more about symbolism, Vrubel, and his Demon

more about my inspiration for Magic Forest

The last month I am working on something I never did before. It’s a collaboration with amazing international glass jewelry artist Nirit Dekel. We did before a few projects with my decals on her glass beads and paper monkeys that play with glass, but now it is something else, and I’m fascinated about the process and where it all goes. The idea is to combine my painting with Nirit’s objects, made out of wood and «growing» glass. Here are some photos from the process:

I just found this video)) Better later than never, as we say in Russian. Limor Margulis, the owner of Nox gallery talks about my works at Fresh Paint 10.

will she say yes?.. :)

When you don’t trust your babysitter

The new chapter

The place I spent my teenage years was far from being aesthetic paradise. Actually, it was (and stays) a real slams. Municipality has some plans to take it all down and build a regular middle-class neighborhood. But right now, just as 20 years ago, these houses are still here. They are so ugly, that has even some kind of old charm.







Back then, this dispiriting landscape around wasn’t bothering me. I was concentrated on myself my friends and our relationship, fantasy books (reading Hobbit and Lord of the Rings again and again), and drawing comics with little creatures, which my mum still keep in a box on top of her cupboard. Not the creatures, of course, the comics.

Now I like to believe I see the real things as they are. I have to see it, because now I am a responsible grown up. We all have to. But sometimes, especially when I am walking around with my kids I enjoy to look through my personal kaleidoscope. Then I can turn this:



into this:



see more transformations

One day I was cutting tomatos and suddenly had an idea for the new painting. «I’ll use pencils, acrylic and watercolors together,» — was I thinking while sketching.



I noticed that the pose and face of one of the women on my sketch reminds Ingre’s La Grande Odalisque (not the albino monkey, but the pencil face on the left)


La Grande Odalisque, Ingres, 1814

Did you notice that her hand is too long, and the left leg is in impossible pose? Well I did, but only after reading about it in wikipedia.

So, this is my Grande Odalisque, but in her normal life, while she is cutting tomatoes after swimming with friends in the river.



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Sometimes I repaint details, or faces again and again. Like in this little portrait. First the head was too big, then not the right face expression, and too looks like me. Yes, it is a self portrait, and supposed to look like me, but too boring — if my cat can look like a leopard, I also can be somebody else)