Sergey Dikovsky

Artist Statement

As long as I remember myself, I’ve had a pencil in my hand or a piece of play dough. Still, growing up with two strong-willed women, I’d never imagined someone someday would look at my art. Also, I was labeled color blind, and in my mind that was a verdict against dreaming of an art school. I see colors a bit differently from others, but I do see them! And yet, with all the discouragement, I simply could not put down a pencil, later - ink, and now - happily - oil and clay. The biggest intersection in my life, I feel, I neared was when the borders opened, and they opened both physically - the end of the Cold War when my family left the Soviet Union - and metaphorically. I saw the world that had always been closed to me. Inside, later, in my late fifties, I started putting on canvases what I could not express verbally. Culturally, I feel, I’m at the intersection; geographically, too: a familiar square in a small Italian village intersects with an avenue of the New World. Animals have human eyes, and as much as I was raised in a country that aggressively denied God and anything godly, I’m still influenced by old Russian icons that my family saved and kept in secrecy. Here comes another intersection - faith and agnosticism. Myth and reality is yet another intersection, and most often they blend in my artwork, like colors blend, like the skies blend into the greenest fields of dreams.