Watercolour on wood, ready to hang.

Signed on the back.

15, 764 in the title is the number of brushstrokes on the painting.

I was always terrified of the power Time has over human minds and bodies. We don’t own Time, we don’t know how much Time we’ll have, and we don’t know what kind of rhythm it will play on our souls. At the same time, we are the creators of Time: it is an artificial construct that justifies our mortality. Time seeps through our lives: blink-blink-blink and all these people around, things we love, places we’ve been to — are gone. One day someone else will blink-blink-blink and we’ll be gone too. It’s easy not to notice Time, but also hard to reconcile with the changes Time usually brings with it. I struggle with Time-induced changes in my personal life too.

To cope with these experiences I created a Temporal Psychoexpression ritual:

Whenever I experience a strong emotion, I find a rhythm to watch unfold — like grass bending in the wind, water ripples running from a boat, dust circling in the summer air, or clouds merging and glowing from the sun. Rhythms mark the time, tap-tap-tap, but there’s no interpretation, no judgment, just a simple registration of the moment that has passed.

I observe and make a mental imprint of the rhythm, soak in the colors, sounds, smells, and air textures — everything that embodies that environment, in that particular moment.

I channel these imprints in my studio: while pouring the sparkling paste-based primer and guiding the way it floods the surface of the board or canvas, while mixing and layering watercolors, and, finally, while pecking the artwork with hundreds of small strokes, using a brush or an acrylic marker.

In a way, my abstract paintings are unconventional infographics: each stroke represents a fraction of a second I spent to create it. Weaving and counting strokes on my canvases and wood panels is a scientific experiment: can I “catch” Time's tail? With my art, I aim to pin it down and box up a minuscule portion of a particular Moment that happened in a particular Place. And anyone is allowed to own it.