Vladimir Zhdanov


Oil on canvas
(Witness – 2026)
The lamb looks up. The sun looks elsewhere.
A solitary figure stands on a hillside before a monumental sun rendered as a human face, its gaze fixed elsewhere. Combining magical realism, surrealism and a poster-like visual language, the work examines the oldest imbalance there is: of vulnerability and power. The use of near-universal symbols removes the scene from any specific culture or era, and evokes a very human condition: the desire to be seen and protected by something distant and indifferent.
The paint was applied in broad, loaded strokes, edging at times toward almost impressionism. The texture is deliberate: roughness and weight compensating for the physical modesty of the canvas, giving the work a monumental presence.






Oil on canvas
(Dream Day – 2025)
She is drawn to the light like a moth, almost instinctively, without clear intention or control.
Daydream shows a moment when attention slips away from the outside world and turns inward. Light plays a key role here, distracting, gently pulling the mind toward escapism and away from reality. It’s a quiet, familiar state of drifting.

Thoughts take over, time slows, and the world becomes less sharp for a while.This painting was developed through a combination of live posing and photographic reference, allowing the moment to be fleeting and suspended, as if caught between movement and stillness. The image aims to suggest something fast and ever-changing paradoxically frozen in time.The work was executed using thin, diluted strokes with minimal layering and a limited colour palette to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. This fragility of the paint surface mirrors the dream state itself, fluid and easily disrupted.







Oil, Linen & Watercolors, Paper 
(Apprentice – 2025)
One scene. Two accounts of it.
This artwork depicts two figures stand in an open wind-swept landscape. One is bare and raw, exposed to the elements. The other is distant and watchful. This is a moment caught between vulnerability and detachment, reflecting the dichotomy between inward- and outward-looking states of thought. 
Both figures are simultaneously young and mature, teaching and learning from one another. The surrounding landscape mirrors their connection to the world, a connection that inevitably grows thinner with age.








Graphite, paper 
(Parasomnia – 2025)
Caught in a few seconds that feel impossibly long.
The figure sinks into the shroud of bedsheets, drifting through a moment where time itself refuses to move. The piece conveys the tension, vulnerability and surreal clarity of sleep paralysis. A state in which awareness returns, but the world remains motionless. The artwork was created in a single sitting using only two pencils and a sheet of wet-paint paper. This specific paper was chosen for its pronounced texture, which introduces a subtle grain-like quality to the surface and further amplifies the sense of unease within the image. I worked exclusively with 2B and 4B pencils, aiming for a restrained but expressive range of tonal contrasts.






Pen, paper
(Initiates – 2025)
Initiates is about the moment when childhood begins to give way to imposed beliefs and collective discipline. The work explores early social conditioning: the quiet expectation to listen, absorb and conform before personal choice is possible. The group is shaped by repetition and silence not force. One outward gaze breaks this cohesion. 
 It speaks to the loss of play and self-determination at an age when identity is still forming, and to the first encounter with a world that demands compliance before understanding.







Acrylic paint, paper
( Patience – 2025)
This painting shows a child who is alone. He finds a strange sense of peace in watching the ants crawling on the ground. He envies them, their quiet purpose, their patience, their honesty that comes from having no thoughts or emotions. He wishes he could become one of them. He doesn’t want to return to the warm light of his home. Instead, he sits perfectly still and pretends to be an inanimate object so the ants won’t fear him.
 So he waits, patiently, silently, trying to understand the insects, trying to belong. He is desperate to make something new out of himself. At last, one ant seems to acknowledge his patience
My Films

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