I have never lived in one place for long. I was born in Ukraine, moved to Russia, then to the United States and from one city to another. When I was younger, it was amusing. I even think I became accustomed to changes. I chose photography for my companion.

As I get older, the old family house, where I grew up with my sister and cousins, emerge in my memory. We could climb the trees and pick roses and other flowers in our garden as much as we wished to in order to make simple dolls. We would collect walnuts as they fell. We had a small “kid’s” garden bed to grow vegetables. Then I began to dream about my own place where I could live for the rest of my life – or just for the next few years. Time seems to run faster day after day. How can the past and the present be caught in a single moment in the same frame? How can they be preserved? How can they be passed on? These questions inspired me to create still lifes that caught the spirit of the old family home and passed it on through generations.

About my art making process

By doing my works, I wanted to reflect masterpieces completed by pictorialists. This is my way to appreciate the predecessors for building the path in fine art for photography, for making space on the walls of museums and galleries for photographs. Like pictorialists’s pictures, my works gain inspiration from their subject and form of traditional art. My muse was that of Old Dutch painters, and I translate their language of still lifes to represent human entity through another expressive medium.

I used real fruits and flowers, natural light, and sometimes even antique objects to resurrect the last century in contemporary photography. My images are printed on silver gelatin paper and sepia selenium toned in order to achieve this effect.