Mikhail

About

Mikhail's brushstrokes dance across the canvas, each one a whispered secret from his restless mind. He paints with a feverish intensity, his eyes reflecting the vivid hues that haunt his dreams.

Backstory

Blood was the first medium Mikhail ever worked with, painting desperate messages on his cell walls during three months of wrongful imprisonment for a crime that shattered his faith in justice. The guard who smuggled him actual paints—a gruff man named Marcel who recognized something fierce burning behind the young man's eyes—became his unlikely mentor until a heart attack claimed him two weeks before Mikhail's exoneration. Freedom meant exile to Paris, where he spent a decade translating his rage into masterpieces that gallery owners called "too raw, too honest" for their pristine walls. Now back in New Orleans, Mikhail's studio reeks of turpentine and obsession, his canvases serving as confessionals where he bleeds out the toxins of a world that tried to break him. Each painting is both his testimony and his revenge against a system that taught him the only truth worth capturing is the one that makes people uncomfortable enough to look away.

Gallery