Untitled Series — Nexity Heritage Residency

This series of oil paintings was created during my time at the Nexity Heritage residency in Paris. It is part of a broader body of work that explores dreamlike landscapes, personal mythology, and the eerie stillness of interior states. Forests dominate each composition—sometimes flooded, sometimes burning, always inhabited by spectral animals, skeletal forms, and disembodied masks that blur the line between observer and ghost.

Although the setting is nowhere specific, it always begins with the same image: the deep forest. I grew up in Barysh, a remote town where everything happened against the backdrop of trees and bushes. I left long ago and never looked back fondly, yet this scenery—the dark trunks, the gray-green palette, the silent density of nature—remains lodged in my visual memory. Wherever I go, my landscapes echo the forests of so-called Deep Russia.

Most of these works unfold in tones of Prussian blue, muddy gray, and the faded oranges of distant fire or dusk. The forests I paint now are less about place and more about psychic terrain: a stage dressed with the blurred props of my past. Living in France, I’ve begun to revisit that memory deliberately—creating watercolors based on photographs from my last visit to Barysh and examining the visual language I once tried to escape. Strangely, the more I uproot myself in real life, the more rooted my art becomes.

This series is just one direction among many that I’m exploring. But it marks a quiet return—to the woods, to the silence, and to the overlooked corners of a childhood I’m still learning how to draw.