For the most time since my late teens, when I started to paint on my own outside of traditional Russian art education program, I was referred to as an impressionist and I feel that this is generally a correct qualification of me as an artist. I am so careful with this opening since today the very term "impressionism", like many other art-related terms, has become somewhat vague and some artists are considered impressionists based solely on their subject matter, brushwork or on other secondary, in my opinion, criteria. The purpose of this artist statement is to describe my understanding of the impressionism.

My main intention as an artist is to convey the mood and emotions that what I see invokes in me. I believe this is the first thing that makes me an impressionist. No matter how personal my work becomes and what artistic means do I employ, my work always stays true to life, which, in my opinion, is the single most important impressionist principle. The predominant impressionist method of being true to life is to work from life, which I do. These are the main reasons why I consider myself to be an impressionist.

This basic notion of the truth to life is a complex and more sensual rather then rational one. It, obviously, is not an exclusive property of the impressionism or any other art movement. I believe, however, that the impressionist art is dominated by it. I have a sense of painting being true to life when an artist transmits through it an emotional message received from the part of a visual world being depicted. It is not a measure of success, though more successful paintings accomplish this task better. It is a matter of a concise choice of ones art as a visual reaction to the visible world as the sole and supreme source of inspiration, emotions, artistic wisdom and beauty. In my opinion, neither attempts to mechanically "copy the nature" nor an indiscriminate application of once successful painterly effects allow an artist to rise to the high standard of being true to life. It requires constant hard work and challenge to ones own habits and believes as well as painstaking stretch of the boundaries of ones abilities.

I am a predominantly landscape plein-airpainter. I believe that the plein-airlandscape, including the cityscape and the seascape, is the single most important impressionist genre that dominates the whole movement both historically and artistically. The landscape sometimes looks simpler than the other representational art, mostly on an account of a common misconception that it does not require an elaborate drawing. In reality, the landscape genre possesses a lot of unique specific challenges, such as changing light, enormous variety of mostly dynamic objects, unpredictability of an outdoor environment, etc. It normally requires an outburst of energy and a very high degree of concentration if one is to accomplish something while the plein-air situation lasts. Since the landscape painting is seldom seriously taught in art schools, for most artist it requires an independent development of an attitude and a skill set of its own that start to affect and often to dominate everything an impressionist paints. My approach to all the genres, some serious differences notwithstanding, is the same in principle and, while being rooted in the traditional Russian academic art, is mostly a derivative of my plein-airpractice.

My education is similar to the one of the leading impressionists despite of differences in time and place. I started in the eighties in Moscow when the only approved and therefore taught style was "the socialist realism". For most of practical purposes it was a rigid XIX century realism with some impressionist influence. I believe that a strong academic foundation is crucial for every artist and is a basis of the impressionism both historically and artistically. The American part of my education, in my opinion, compliments the Russian part well, mostly with providing additional points of view at art and with opening me more for experimentation. In my opinion the critical openness to novelty is an important impressionist principle that I share, in contrast to an innovation for innovation’s sake that was never part of the impressionism or my own artistic agenda.

I always continue to learn from masters, while staying true to life provides the best way for me to stay true to myself by avoiding excessive influences even by the strongest of artists. I can repeat after Hopper that I myself always was my only major influence. The other benefit I of staying true to life enjoy is a lack of necessity to squeeze myself into a commonly known, formally well-defined narrow group or school of painting. After being referred to as "Painterly Realist", "Russian Impressionist", "Expressive Impressionist", "Post-Modernist Impressionist", I do not consider the exact verbal definition of my style to be of a principal importance. In my opinion, both artistic independence and comparative unimportance of dominating groups, theories and schools is an important quality of the impressionism that has always been an inclusive, dynamic and democratic art.

Throughout more than a century of its history, the impressionism was resented by significant, sometimes dominant, forces of the art world, first as a "non-professional" art, later as too "sweet", convenient and established. As far as I am concerned, it is a very demanding, fighting, fierce and, sometimes, tragic art. As broad and dynamic as the impressionism is, it can be unified the best, I think, by a slogan-like Pissarro’s statement: "Impressionism is a real art because it is honest". In spite of all the residues of a slogan dislike from my Soviet-era youth, I agree with this one.