Pushka is a figurative painter using imagination to distort and intensify observed life, creating emotionally charged scenes.

His work explores states of flux: between likeness and distortion, memory and absence, body and landscape, and the personal and the mythic. His paintings seek to make presence felt - not only how things appear, but the psychological and often uncanny charge beneath them.

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Materiality is central to his practice. Thick impasto, bleeding washes, and unstable mark-making operate as metaphors for fragility, unruliness, and transformation. While biography is often a starting point - including themes of grief, ancestry, and canal life - the aim is archetypal resonance, where individual images speak to shared emotional experience.

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His work holds contradictions: tenderness and threat, beauty and unease, control and collapse. Rooted in observation as much as introspection, Pushka draws from life, collecting images from his surroundings while allowing them to be reshaped through memory, intuition, and imagination - working, as he describes it, with one eye open and one eye closed.

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Pushka is also a curator, and founder and director of Canal Boat Contemporary, a small travelling gallery that hosts short, focused exhibitions from a canal boat. He has been invited to curate a room for the Blink Project in Peckham in April.

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Also in April, he will spend the month on the Xenia Residency in Hampshire.
 

In February he won the Royal Watercolour Society's 2026 Daniel Smith Prize.

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He recently travelled to Turin to interview Guglielmo Castelli for Turps Magazine - out soon.