I was born in Liepaja, Latvia, a small town on the Baltic Sea coast. A town of tiled roofs and lonely cobbled streets. Then I lived in Riga for quite a while. I first saw paintings by Mikalojus Čiurlionis as a schoolboy in the Kaunas museum. I was so impressed that I bought myself a set of paints and brushes and tried to reproduce those paintings from memory. It was my first artistic experience. Probably, that is when I took to painting. In 1979, I participated in my first art exhibition in the Leningrad Palace of Youth.
I graduated from the St. Petersburg State University with a degree in History. My opinion is that everything that happened once is reflected in our present day; we live and create our present and future out of our past. I always believed that there were three areas of human life where the human nature revealed itself as nowhere else. These are sports, sex, and war. No falsehood is allowed there, everything is for real. The history of mankind is mainly the history of wars and the war theme always attracted me, so much so that I happened to have a related first-hand experience... That is the reason I always painted and keep painting war scenes. My first project that dealt with the war theme, Saigon, Vietnam, was dedicated to the Vietnam War.
I attended art studio, then took lessons from the renowned artist Valery Lukka. I studied Chinese philosophy and Zen Buddhism. For three years, I took lessons in calligraphy from the master Xiao Yao and spent a year studying the traditional Chinese ink painting guo-hua in the Chinese cultural centre. The first project dealing with the philosophy of the Tao was Inner Vision.