I don’t paint scenes; I paint states of feeling. Every mark—knife-gouged line, spray haze, finger-smeared oil—records the emotion moving through me in that moment. When the surface finally crackles, the piece is finished and my mood is spent. From then on, the canvas belongs to you.
Beginning in 2019, I started hunting for a voice—oil only, pushing cubism into raw expressionism until the shapes felt mine. By 2021 I knew what a Sannikov canvas should look like: deep, layered colour planes scraped and rebuilt until they almost hummed. 2022 made me bolder; I mixed fast-drying spray with slow-drying oil so I could carve, smear and revisit the surface in one session. Oil only paintings became history at the start of 2023, which was dedicated to black-and-white. Even a couple of spray-only pieces emerged—proof that raw emotion can live in simplicity. 2024 pulled every lesson together: bright, large-format works where dense oil textures and quick spray gestures clash and click inside the same frame.
Collectors tell me a Sannikov painting keeps changing. What looked like joy last year might read as restlessness today, because the work isn’t a picture on the wall; it’s a mirror of the soul that shifts with your own seasons. That open-ended dialogue is why I stay self-taught and border-free. I refuse the safety rails of any academy or regional “style.”
My only rule: be honest, be bold, be alive.
Showcasing my commitment to strength sports and media recognition in the creative field.
Official sponsor of the World's Strongest Man series for the Estonian event. Supporting elite athletes in their pursuit of greatness through financial contributions and artistic collaborations that showcase the intersection of strength and creativity.
My sponsorship was a small contribution to bring the first ever Estonia event to reality, support our own athletes and bring more awareness to the sport as Estonian strongmen are in the top of the world.
Estonian National (ETV+) art segment in "Horisont" (2023) showcased my exhibition "19" opening, featuring the "Old Town Nights 21" collection to 200,000+ viewers across Estonia.
• "El Chapo" — Rüütli 9, Tartu (2024)
• "Veg Machine" — Aparaaditehas, Tartu (2022)
Almost all paintings are part of some collection. They share elements and themes with other pieces from that certain time period.
Five larger-format canvases, each one carrying a year of my practice on its shoulders.
Big Five 24 fuses the oil-heavy, knife-scraped intensity of 2020, the meticulous layering and detail that defined 2021, the bare-knuckle rawness I chased in 2022, and the unapologetic boldness of my monochrome work in 2023. All four strands clash and cooperate inside 2024’s wider frame, turning individual moods into a single crowd on the wall. The result is part time-capsule, part social experiment—proof that style evolves like people do: by arguing, borrowing and finally finding common ground.
A year-long experiment in self-restraint.
For twelve months I stripped away the signature element of my work—vibrant colour—and limited every canvas to black, white and the greys they create. Depriving myself of hue forced new priorities: texture, contrast, negative space. Knife-gouged strokes feel sharper, spray mists read like breath, and the untouched linen suddenly matters as much as the paint.
Monochrome 23 is the record of that discipline. Each piece sits on the edge between silence and noise, calm and urgency, inviting you to project your own mood onto the simplest palette possible. Fewer ingredients, bolder impact.
Colour, tea, and slow lofi nights.
While my canvases stayed locked in black-and-white for Monochrome 23, I gave myself quiet permission to explore colour on small paperback sheets. Unhurried sessions—lofi house in the background, mug of tea by the palette—grew into Alternative 23: a set of intimate works where oil glazes, soft water-colours, deliberate marker lines, and a single spray-paint haze drift across rough book pages.
Most pieces unfold layer by layer, every tone placed with intention rather than speed. Oil adds depth, water-colour breathes, markers trace calm rhythms; together they turn each page into a slow meditation on hue. Small scale, measured tempo, full-spectrum relief—proof that even during a year of restraint, colour can bloom when given time and quiet space.
Controlled chaos, with every detail still alive.
In Heretics 22 I walked away from the tidy blueprints of my earlier work and let instinct run the studio. Thick oil, fast spray and knife-scratched lines collide in compositions that look spontaneous yet hide microscopic structure. The detail is still there for most paintings—it just feels unplanned, emotional, half-feral.
Each canvas is a push toward being unapologetically myself: less diagram, more pulse. Edges overlap on purpose, drips stay where they fall, and colour fields surge past their borders. It’s the moment I stopped tidying up and started trusting the mess—a bolder step forward, led by feeling rather than strategy.
Long nights, thick layers, pure persistence.
Most of Old Town Nights 21 grew out of solitary sessions in the atelier, where isolation let me stack layer upon layer of wet oil until the surface literally bulged. No paint was removed—each new pass stayed, pushing the previous one deeper into the canvas. The final skins carry knife-cut grooves and raw emotion etched straight through fresh colour.
This series also marks my pivot: still driven by dense oil texture, but now joined by spray bursts, paper fragments, book cut-outs that sink into the pigment like half-hidden memories. The result is obsessive detail wrapped in measured chaos—a timestamp of the moment I moved from oil-only discipline to the mixed-media language I use today.
Raw, oil-only, zero polish.
Beginnings 20 is the year I threw straight oil onto canvas and let curiosity lead. Early pieces flirt with rough-edged cubist shapes; as the months roll on, brushes give way to knife scrapes, finger drags and screwdriver scratches. No spray, no paper—just oil, pushed and punished until a personal language began to surface.
The canvases run like a timeline of trial and error: colour blocks break apart, textures pile up, and composition gets wilder with every layer. What you see here is the first honest blueprint of my style—unrefined, searching, and already itching to go bigger and bolder.
