My more than forty years of work with sculpture, painting and graphics has permitted me to considerably broaden my knowledge of the surrounding world.

I took my first steps in art in the late 1950s when I undertook a profound study of nature to which I dedicated three full years.  During that period I painted over one thousand open air studies, which then prompted me to seek new avenues in the further development of my art.

It was my good fortune that in the early 1960s two giants from the Vkhutemas Art Institute of Moscow were teaching in the Kharkov Institute of Art where I was studying, Vasily Ermilov, the father of Ukrainian Constructivism and Boris Kosarev, professor of color harmony.  Meetings with Ermilov – who became my close friend and spiritual mentor – changed my world outlook, revealing to me the diversity of my surroundings.

The body of Ermilov’s 20^th Century works had a powerful impact on me because until that time I had been surrounded only by works of the officially recognized exponents of “sozrealism.”  His surprising compositions utilizing various materials like metal, sand, wood, executed with such perfection, awakened in me a certain trembling.  As a result I undertook a search for new forms in my own work.

My further development led to the use of more complex forms that gave me a broader view of the complex play of form and space so that my art creates in the viewer a kind of physiological reaction.  I am convinced that each display of form using color independently of the possibility of recognition of the portrayed subject/material influences the viewer, permitting him to penetrate more deeply the world around us.

This constant experimentation gave me the wonderful present of the subconscious satisfaction of the discovery of still more energetic expressions of color and form.  Each new work created the groundwork for my continuing search for new forms of expression.  As I moved toward more voluminous solutions, my Reliefs become more animated.  They vibrated.  Form was transformed into new activity.  This, I believe, combined to exert an influence on the viewer.

The complicated situation of the artist-innovator led to a total break with the official direction of art in my former homeland and led to my decision to emigrate.  In 1976 with my wife Irina and our 7-year-old daughter Oksana, we first moved to Italy and then to the United States. 

New York City not only did not change my perceptions of art.  On the contrary the rich art terrain of New York allowed me to continue the synthesis of my art begun in 1963 in Russia.  I utilized Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism to develop my Neo-Cubism using however diverse sources of thousands of years ago in the conviction that our past roots will bear fruit in the new millennium.

I believe that the artist must nourish himself from the environment, from the flora and the fauna.  Without this awareness everything will die off and be finally transformed into an element of total soullessness and a break between man and nature.  For that reason, I returned to the landscape and nature in my series Central Park.