I bring the sensibilities and influences of both Soviet socialist realism as well as the classical European painting tradition to my thoroughly contemporary immigrant perspective. I am both the old and the new.

Instead of destroying or denying the old, I take what I love about it and put it into my employ to serve my contemporary purposes. I use the tradition of realism to anchor my shaky identity of a transplant who’s been trying to assimilate into a different culture and temporality.

I want both, the mastery of old and the audacity of the new.
I want to de Kooning and Courbet on the same canvas.
I want the rich glow of traditional oil disrupted by the violence that can only show itself in painting now.
I want my roots to show.

I paint tired people from underprivileged backgrounds. I paint over-sexualized young girls who think that a thicker layer of lipstick and a fuller fringe of fake lashes will give them a chance to escape the habitual squalor to a sunny life from a luxury cruise ship advert.

I paint mediocrity and the absurd. I paint what my life would have been had I not left.
I feel contempt and compassion, I feel survivor’s guilt. I wonder if I have the right to my imagery.
How longer can I live away from a place and still claim authenticity when depicting it? Aren’t I a tourist in my own past, and my alternative present by now?

I am after the absurd and uncanny, but only so slightly.
I love it in the middle: the slightly dusty, not too worn out, pinching, but not rubbing raw; the mild annoyance that wears at the patience of living.
I want the texture that is seen every day, familiar to the last crack and crevasse, and therefore rendered invisible.
I want the familiar uncanny, the strangeness of an otherwise mundane dream, obliquely noticed yet not peculiar enough to demand scrutiny.