Pittsburgh Artist Registry

I grew up in New Jersey, half-Russian in the Cold War with the radio playing and the Vietnam War looming. My uncle was killed in combat, so his four children came to live with us – and stayed. I spent my time playing in backyard streams, reading and drawing pictures. A high school art teacher told me that I was an artist.      I have lived and worked in New York, Hong Kong, LA, Paris and Pittsburgh. Asia was especially influential. Other influences include American landscape painting, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bill Viola.     If there's a lifelong thread in my work, it is an effort to let reality to speak for itself. A selected or simplified reality, perhaps, but never a fictionalized one. I have worked in various genres and across media, but always with an eye to the messages implicit in my surroundings.     In 2003, I was painting prolifically from life... until I lost my eyesight to rapidly-developing cataracts. Surgery did not restore my vision so much as replace it, and I could no longer paint the way I had been. I discovered digital photography.     My first project, La Fleur du Jour, was a by-product of recovery – and rediscovery. Themes of transience and ephemera were inherent in the subject matter, underscored by the fleeting, intangible means and medium of e-mail.       The next e-mail “postcard” series, One Hand Clapping, is a reference to a famous Zen koan. The images also evoke ideas of transience, and are intended as a momentary mediation, something to ponder. I use e-mail rather than blogs or social media intentionally; it is a personal communication, not subject to trends. I think of the pieces as found objects – I never alter the site or the facts of the image. I look for the "extraordinary ordinary," visual koans, unintended ironies, ambiguity, incongruity, accidental paradox. I prefer images that must be photographed –  to paint them would feel fictional – and that offer no single interpretation.