I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, mostly because it was the only place where the world made sense. I grew up in a small town in eastern Ukraine — the kind of place where art wasn’t seen as a real future, just a hobby you eventually outgrow. So I didn’t go to art school. I got a degree, tried “normal life,” took on every job that made sense on paper.

But painting stayed. It was always the thing I returned to when everything else felt too loud.

I started traveling young, taking modeling contracts and eventually living in Asia for eight years. That opened my world, but it also showed me how easily you can lose yourself while chasing a version of life that isn’t really yours.

When the war reached my hometown, something shifted. You suddenly understand how fragile everything is, and how stupid it is to postpone the things that make you feel alive. I ended up doing a lot of shadow work — actually looking at myself, not the persona I built to survive. That’s when painting stopped being a side thing and became a way of stitching myself back together.

For me, the hardest question a person can ask is: What is actually mine? What is the path inward, not outward?
My work is my attempt to answer that — slowly, imperfectly, through color, distortion, and mood.

If my paintings do anything, I hope they open a small doorway for the viewer to step into their own inner space — the deep, private place we all avoid but secretly crave. A place where solitude isn’t isolation, just heightened perception.