Cloud waterfall. 1998
Pencil, paper. 8 x 20 cm

Graphics in Japanese vertical format "kakemono". There were two reasons to draw this picture:

- Childhood memories. In the lower grades of the Soviet school, there was a textbook on natural history, and in it an illustration and an article on the water cycle in nature. Then for the first time the thought came that not only water turns into different states, but there must be something else. However, knowledge of the theory of Five Elements came much later. This doctrine tells that non-material energy goes through the cycle of material elements. Water (liquid) nourishes Wood, Wood creates Air (Fire), Air oxidizes Wood and creates Earth, Earth gives birth to Metal (ore, crystals, ice), Metal melts and creates liquid (ice passes to water).

- Impression of the works of the Japanese artist Ando Hiroshige (1797 - 1858). Japanese and Chinese schools allowed for the abandonment of color and minimalism in detail to show the illusion of the material world. In their terms, art should not try to accurately reproduce reality. Objects are drawn only enough to indicate hidden meaning through them. The vertical format is also preferred for showing hidden meaning, because the viewer does not look horizontally to examine individual objects. The mind perceives the composition of objects as a whole, located on a certain basis or core.

This cloud waterfall does not exist as a real geographical place. It is an invented symbol of dim border between ground, water and the sky. The water fog is formed at top of the waterfall, and rises and mixs up with clouds. As in this fog there is a turbulence, from a point of the spectator can seem, that the waterfall passes from the clouds.