Projects

The brief was to create an image of an impossible world, layered with magic and mystery, seamlessly weaving together the four realms of the exhibition: fairy tales, portals, quests, and the weird – each populated with myriad characters, ranging from the depths of hell right into cosmos. From Tolkien to Gaiman, and from Queen Mab to Baba Yaga, it’s packed with a hundred references to the genre.

Some of the illustrations for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, done for the exhibition "Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark." The exhibition tells the remarkable story of the rescue of the Danish Jews during the Holocaust. Despite the enormous risk, ordinary citizens managed to save nearly 95% of Denmark’s Jewish population.

Art series inspired by the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang. Dunhuang was a multicultural hubbub between East and West during the Silk Road trade for hundreds of years. Artistory kindly offered me a unique opportunity to study the mesmerizing paintings of the caves and come up with own interpretations of these timeless dream images.

The watercolors in this project belong to an unfinished series "Gods and Ghosts in Sacred Land" – magic realism works featuring local (Israeli) cities and their babylonian mix of cultures and lifestyles. I am also doing a lot of pencil sketches from local everyday street life and have added some of the highlights from sketchbooks here.

Sample illustrations from my mock 'how-to' book on parenthood called "How to Handle a Child". While all the episodes in the book are true stories and conversations with my three kids, each chapter is illustrated with a relevant scene from my own childhood. The illustrations balance between the child’s perception (magical, unreal, enchanted, yet taken for granted as solid fact of life) and brutal truth (the reality of my childhood was more wild than anything I could invent). 
The illustrations address the core things that make childhood what is it – the freshness of perception, the agony of growing up, the mischief, and the absence of borderline between the real and the fanciful.

In summer 2018, I was selected for an awesome three-months artist residency in Swatch Art Peach Hotel in Shanghai, China. I created a body of works called "Life in Shanghai", contemplating daily life in city, viewing it as a metaphor of modern-day Babylon – mixture of east and west, past and present, cultures and lifestyles. Like most of my personal work, the series is an artistic document that encapsulates time and city and carries the message about how versatile, complex, contradictory, yet beautiful is the motley fabric that life is woven from. These are brush drawings made with Chinese ink on rice paper. I plan to turn them into an artist book, complete with numerous street sketches, stories and people, that have made my stay so enchanting and otherworldly. If you'd like to be posted on the artbook progress, please subscribe to this website's updates.

In 2014-15 I was working on a 12-book series of books "History Through the Eyes of Krokodil magazine, the XX century" as an art director. The project was at attempt at a conversation about the XXth century based on a huge archive of the Soviet satirical magazine "Krokodil" (1922-1992). The archive had oodles of pictures depicting everything in the Soviet life, from eye-candy street scenes to eye-popping propaganda. Each chapter in our books contained a gallery of caricatures and genre scenes from the magazine, dedicated to a certain topic: children of the revolution, new women, proletarian glamour, etc. Here are some of my illustrations opening the galleries of authentic drawings from the archive.

Illustrations for the The True Adventures of Wolfboy movie, a 2019 American coming-of-age film, directed by Martin Krejčí, written by Olivia Dufault, and starring Jaeden Martell, Chloë Sevigny, John Turturro, Chris Messina, and Eve Hewson.

Evocative illustrations for magazine editorials about famous people that grew up in Baku and share their memories of childhood and youth years, spent in the ardently loved city.

Medieval illuminations and early renaissance emblemata are a huge source of inspriration of mine. In this project I have collected artworks from various books I have illustrated, which have drawn on my deep fascination with the epoch when art spoke in symbols and allegories and could be read like a book, without the help of words.

This project includes artworks from three years of illustrating horoscopes for Baku magazine, Azerbaijan. The images are inspired by the oriental splendor of Persian miniature and ancient sky atlases.

A collection of interesting maps for various YA fantasy books

LOVE is an erotic mix-and-match toy book that marries poetry, art and design. 18+

This project includes a set of Tarot cards for Halsey's "Hopeless Fountain Kingdom", a card per song. I have also inluded samples from other projects involving Tarot imagery. No, the full Tarot deck with my artwork doesn't exist yet, but yes, I am planning to do that and you here, site subscribers, would be the first to know!

Alchemy style illustrations for print ads of Jefferson's Bourbon, commissioned by JWT New York. This project was shortlisted for World Illustration Awards 2018 in advertising category.

Anne Frank with my illustrations in the "Little People, Big Dreams" series by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara. "Little People, Big Dreams" is a best-selling, critically acclaimed series of picture books that explore the lives of outstanding people, from artists to scientists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. Anne Frank's was not an easy story to tell to a very young audience. I used the black and white graphic approach, with spot color on the diary. I also inserted an additional narrative motif of birds as symbols of this or that emotion (happiness, serenity, dream, menace, loss.) Though children might not read into all the allusions in the illustrations, picture books are read to them by adults – and they certainly will. I strongly believe that illustrations should elicit comment and inspire conversation beyond what's written in the text, and this was my approach here as well.

Select pen and ink illustrations from a lovely book of poems for children by David Schulzinger "Have You Seen My Pet Dragon?" The topics range anywhere from imaginary friends and impossible inventions to time travel and scary stories in a camping tent.

The Land of Stone Flowers is a collection of illustrated stories in which gnomes, pixies, and other fairy folk share tall tales of the strange and unbelievable human world and its inhabitants. Brimming with keen observations and wild assumptions on human anatomy, customs, languages, rituals, dwellings, and more, the book is as absurd as it is astounding, examining contradictory and nonsensical human behaviors through the lens of the fantastic: from the bewitching paper wizards who live in humans' wallets to their invisible hats, known as "moods," which cloud their view of the world. Bursting with intricate and evocative illustrations, The Land of Stone Flowers creates a world of fantasy and fable that slyly reveals many hidden truths about human existence.

Select commissioned covers for books, magazines, music records and movie posters.