About the artist
A short note on where the work comes from, and where it is going next.
My name is Roman Golovachev and I work under the name ROGB ART. I am a self-taught artist, and painting has been the constant thread of my adult life — the place where I process what I see, remember, and feel.
I live and work in Lisbon, Portugal. Before that I spent years in Montenegro, and before that in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. I was born and raised in Novosibirsk, in the heart of Siberia. Each of these places left a different kind of light in me, and the work is in many ways a record of moving through them.
My practice began as an inner need rather than a formal program. I drew and painted for years on my own before the work gradually found its own language and began to be collected. Today my paintings live in private collections across Russia and Europe, and I continue to develop the practice from my studio in Lisbon.
What the work is about
At its core, the work is about space — how light, weather, and memory change the way a place feels. I am interested in the moment just before a landscape turns into an emotion: a winter afternoon in Siberia, a dust storm over Ulaanbaatar, the slow tide of the Adriatic, the dry, mineral light of southern Portugal. I try to paint the feeling of those places rather than their appearance.
How it begins
Every painting starts with a state. Sometimes it is a place I have just been to; sometimes it is a sound, a temperature, a colour I cannot get out of my head. I work in series, and a series usually grows out of a single emotion or atmosphere that refuses to leave me alone until I have followed it onto canvas.
My works are the energy I draw from within myself and transfer onto the canvas.
— Roman Golovachev
A path through places
A loose geography of the practice. The order is not strictly chronological — it follows the way the work itself moved.
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Novosibirsk
Siberia, Russia
Where I grew up and where the first need to draw and paint began. The long winters and flat horizons of western Siberia are still a reference point in everything I do.
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Irkutsk
Eastern Siberia
Years of self-taught work. Long, quiet winters around Lake Baikal shaped an interest in cold light, muted colour, and the slow movement of time across a landscape.
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Ulaanbaatar
Mongolia
A period of intense contrast — dust, sky, wind, and open steppe. The work became freer and more physical, and the scale of the paintings grew.
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Montenegro
Adriatic coast
A change of palette and rhythm. The work turned toward the sea, stone, and warmer light, while keeping the same inner discipline developed in colder climates.
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Lisbon
Portugal
The current studio. The dry Atlantic air and the quality of light here have pushed the work further toward clarity, texture, and a quieter, more open surface.
Materials and method
I work almost exclusively with acrylic on canvas. Acrylic gives me the speed I need — the paint dries quickly enough that a feeling can stay on the surface before it cools into something overworked.
My tools change with the painting. Some pieces are built slowly with brushes; others are pushed, dragged, and shaped with a palette knife, with my hands, with cotton thread, with pieces of fabric, and with dry grasses and other natural materials. The surface is meant to be read by touch as much as by eye.
Each layer carries the trace of the gesture that made it. The painting is finished when the surface holds the emotion that started it — and when nothing more needs to be added for the work to breathe.
