Homesick for the places that never let me go
I live in Vancouver, but my soul is somewhere between a Moscow apartment, a memory of snowflakes falling through a street lamp’s glow, the streets of New York, and the orange cones of Montreal.
Part of me is still in Paris, the one I never lived in, but imagined. Imagined throughout all my other lives, as if it was more real. I was always painting. I lived in a basement apartment and waited tables to afford my dreams. I had nothing, and yet I was more myself than I have ever been.
Vancouver is beautiful, the ocean, the mountains. Here, everything works. People are quiet, reserved, recycle , talk about hiking and rain. The days pass in clean lines. The kind of order that numbs rather than heals. Pain feels out of place and beauty does not cut deep. I forget what I came here to remember.
But the snow keeps falling in my mind. And the moon sees me, as it did in Moscow.
Workshops
I have been painting since 7th grade and teaching art since 2015.
I meet children and adults in the in-between hours of ordinary days: for after school art programs, in drawing and watercolour workshops for adults who have forgotten how to see.
All of us are born with the impulse to create, but soon the world teaches us to distrust our own hands.
I have made it my mission to offer a small window, a breath of freedom, where the drawings need not explain themselves.
My roots are in the old ways, but what I truly pass on is not a technique. It is permission. Permission to feel more deeply. To make marks that mean something.
I do not promise mastery. Only this: that creating, even in its quietest form, can feel like coming home to a part of yourself the world never noticed.
