Leonard Zinovyev

I have written some 300 poems, some 150 short stories and two novels, and made some 100 artistic videos. This web site of mine, however, is only confined to my digital images, it's my online art gallery of sorts.

Oh, one more thing. There is no philosophy behind my work whatsoever. Philosophy only makes things more complicated, while I choose clarity.

No more masterpieces!

Antonin Artaud

Up until now, I was very reluctant to reveal the secrets of my artistic proficiency. I imagined them in a shape of a TOP SECRET! CLASSIFIED INFORMATION! cardboard file hidden from the public view for at least the following fifty years. But art is not something to be stored away, and secrets tend to come to light, sooner or later. Now your attention, please! The magician is going to show you how his magic hat works, and explain to you how he conjures up all these doves and rabbits as if out of nowhere.

Let’s suppose I want to make an amusing picture, like this one, with politicians and pop culture characters. Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Jr. plus a picturesque location. Nice image, isn’t it? What I need to make this image is:

-a picture with a house in ruins
-a picture with Dmitry Medvedev
-a picture with Vladimir Putin
-a picture with George W. Bush
-a picture with one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Can anyone think of them creepy-crawly names?)

An easy task of surfing through the Internet often takes me hours. All pictures are under copyright, and copyright owners present a problem, seeing as it is very hard for me to obtain their permission to use their priceless photos.

Now that all the images I need are on my hard disk, I can get down to work. All I have to do is to paste the politicians and reptiles, and to paste them onto the ruined house.

But it’s easier said than done!

So I open PhotoImpact XL and paste Dmitry, Vladimir, George, and Michelangelo (that’s the turtle’s name) onto the background. I keep arranging and rearranging them in this way and that and another – and my work doesn’t seem to come out right. Please notice that I only set the subject of my picture – it was the popular heroes plus picturesque scenery, but I did not plan from whether they would be standing two-deep or three-deep, or just in a row. It is impossible to plan ahead when it comes to making images like this, one has to learn to think on their feet! So George goes here. And Michelangelo goes there. Finally, the time-consuming and eye-destroying jigsaw puzzle is done, and all the guys are in their right places.

Still my work looks pretty rough. What can I do to conceal the shoddy seams? Go over them with the watercolour effect? Or to make the whole picture in pastel? First I try watercolours, then I try pastel, and my image is totally ruined. Corel Photo Paint 12 can be a solution! After all, even the best image editors are not perfect, because functions included in one editor are nonexistent in another, and vice versa. I apply the crayon. That’s about it. But I am not quite happy with the result. I apply the effect again – and the image looks like a painting by a drunk fauvist painter . I undo the last step. All I can do now to make my picture look properly is to crayon it up manually. Three more hours of straining my eyes looking at the magnified picture and correcting almost every single pixel. Prime minister’s cheek pressed against Michelangelo’s shoulder is the real son-of-a-bitch to paint.

Voila! At last my wonderful image is finished and ready to be published online. Where is my eye dropper? I want to feast my eyes on my anti-masterpiece!

I was born on the 15th of March 1979 in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Graduated from Chelyabinsk State-run University in 2001.

Have been writing poetry and ficition since I was in my teens.

Took up video art in 2006 and digital art in 2008.

Biographies aren't the most exciting reading, I agree.