This work began with a meeting with Father Leonid Grilikhes, who proposed combining the texts of the Song of Songs and the Book of Ruth in his translation and my painting into a book. Impressions from recent years of travel through the lands of the Middle East and historical Byzantium became the source material for the work - the ancient cities of Syria and Jordan, Jerusalem and Tabor, Jordan and the Neggev desert, Mount Nebo and Moab, the Royal Road and the entire Holy Land that keeps in the dust of its roads the story of two Testaments. In this land, the air is saturated with eternity, all the past millennia are repeated again and again with every pomegranate blossom, in every berry of the grapevine, which are all the same - both today and in the garden of King Solomon...

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The Song of Songs is both the highest metaphor and the truest reality. In the closest, tangible things the most supermundane and great is hidden, in the human palm, in a pomegranate apple both the Universe and the abyss. From the most general, universal to the most particular, intimate, to instantaneity, which reveals eternity.

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In the Book of Ruth, the main theme for me is the choice of path, the personal choice by a young woman of the path of fidelity, inner peace and freedom of this choice. The reward is love, a hearth, blessed offspring. The self-denial and integrity of young Ruth made it possible for King David and King Solomon to come to this world. The Ruth Cycle - landscapes of the route that Ruth took millennia ago from Moab to Galilee.

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In the design of the books and in the painting itself, motifs from early Christian mosaics and Cappadocian frescoes are used. This is not just an aesthetic choice. Being, as it were, a step, a transition from text to painting, they set the tone, the vector for the Old Testament text. In the temple art of early Byzantium there is an amazing unity of a joyful hymn and everyday life, the private life of a person and the highest meaning, when each reality - a bunch of grapes, a cooing dove, a basket of fruits and a pomegranate - develops into a symbol. Through a transformed life, a reliable image of another world appears, permeated with the joy of a person’s meeting with God.

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So on the pages of these books there is a personal, personal view, turned from today to the tradition of the Testament (translation of Father Leonid and painting, word and vision of a contemporary) - and the reality of eternity through the Old Testament Text living above the book and mosaics, frescoes as documentary evidence of unshakable joy the first centuries of the Gospel, that Easter joy, about which the entire Song of Songs is.