When I began to paint and draw seriously, I really wanted to do woodcuts or colored lithography, but I didn’t have the ability to do that. So I began to work in the mixed media (ink, watercolor and pastel) that comes closest to a graphic print. And that’s how everything began to go. I began to like drawing and painting this way, and so I began to produce this style of work.

My style is hard to describe. Many people say that my work reminds them of Salvador Dali (and that’s a big compliment for me), but I don’t agree. In my opinion, my style is something between surrealism and modern art, and I only remind myself of me. But that’s really only the place of gallery owners and critics to discuss.

The themes of my work include simple human emotions, like the eternal fight between good and evil, love and hate, pleasure and pain, and comedy and tragedy. In my art, I try to show that there is always a path towards something better.

A person passes through different periods of hate, rejection, fear, pain and love. Before coming to America, I lived in a forgotten country in Eastern Europe where evil, hate, pain and fear exist in excess. People have to recognize these things in themselves in order to think about whether they really aren’t that way and that there isn’t always a better way out.

I think that human imagination is unending and that artists can and must discover this in themselves. If everyone could become free enough to show one small part of his true self, he could realize many new things.

Because now, in the 21^st century, art is really confused and we have to look for the path towards something new and different to move forward. When a person enters a gallery, he must easily be able to tell the difference in style, theme and media in the paintings of different artists.

That’s enough, because, in my opinion, paintings are for looking at, not for reading about.