"TSARITSINO. CHILDHOOD"
Oil on canvas, 80x100 cm.

I spent my childhood in Tsaritsino park, when it was completely deserted in winter and summer, when there were no high-rises around, when it still was a bit village impressive. Hundreds, no thousands of times I walked along the Tsaritsino ponds to the park over the dam - to play hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers or climb the ruins. The mysterious red-white buildings were hidden in greenery, there were no signs and paths, no street lamps and benches, no crowd, just birds in the lindens and us, children. Rarely barbarian alpinists messed the silence - cleared out the bindweed and drived their fasteners in the red-bcik walls. There was although one house finished - Cavalier Building. It is still there, behind the Palace bridge, on the edge of a hill. There used to be the art school in it. When I was 6 years old, my father brought me there, I was given my first folding easle, I took a brush for the first time - and thus started the way half of which I’ve traveled by now.

The village is demolished, insulas (apartment buildings) are erected in-stead but there, in my sweet Tsaritsino I baptized my daughter in the Church of life-giving spring, my family used to come there all together, especially in winter to drive in a sledge - here I was a boy and here I will baptize my son, in the same church. Yet after the "restauration" I have never been there.