Artist Statement

I came to painting later in life, after completing the main part of my professional career. For many years, my work was connected with technological processes and the architectural environment. When I was young, I studied drawing and painting. This was still within the Soviet school, where the ability to understand form, space, proportion and colour was considered fundamental. For several decades I hardly returned to these practices, but the visual way of thinking itself never really disappeared.

When I retired and began painting again, architecture became my first subject. I was interested in urban spaces, buildings, aerial views and landscapes seen from above, almost as if a territory could be observed from a distance and understood not as a collection of separate objects, but as an interconnected whole. Gradually, I realised that I was becoming less interested in the buildings or landscapes themselves and more interested in the structures that appeared between them.

This is how I came to the idea of pattern.

I am interested in pattern not as ornament and not as mechanical repetition, but as a way in which living matter organises itself. If we look closely at water, vegetation, an urban landscape, a bird’s feathers, the windows of a building or the surface of the earth, almost everything begins to reveal a repeating structure. Yet the repetition is never exact. Each element differs slightly from the one before it.

This difference is important to me. Pattern creates order while also allowing that order to change. Because of this, a structure can remain stable without becoming fixed or lifeless.

In my work, I try to understand where the boundary lies between repetition and variation, between system and chance. I am interested in the internal laws that allow many separate elements to form a coherent whole, and in why certain structures appear natural to us even when we cannot fully explain how they are organised.

Perhaps one of the mysteries of nature is contained within pattern itself: the ability to repeat a principle endlessly without ever repeating a form in exactly the same way. It is this space between order and living variation that I continue to explore through painting.