“Mother Nature has plenty of ways to create artists. Some are born to carry the burden of tradition, others come to break with the antiquated legacies of the masters of the past. Some are inspired by forms, textures, or color spectrums, others are driven by certain ideas. Many artists separate their everyday life from art. But not Misha Shapiro, whose life is actually an artistic communication with nature, society, new technologies, diseases, complexities of ethnic issues, etc.
Shapiro is a wonderful story-teller, creating fascinating tales of his own real life experiences. He feels at home in the woods, where wild mushrooms and berries seem to grow especially for him to pick. He is a skillful ice-fisher and a computer designer, a brilliant cook and a decent rock- climber; he can drive a car or pilot a hang-glider. His stories are full of all kinds of adventures, which finally come to a happy end.
And what about his paintings? Like his tales, they absorb all the events and impressions of his life. His Hebrew origin has made it easy for him to feel the spirit of his Ancestors'land as he first set his foot on it. He appeared to have all the skills one would need to express the glowing substance of its atmosphere, and paintings of the hills of Judea and Galilee came out with an ease that he had never enjoyed in his artistic life before.
The impulse he felt under Israel's sun made him see his canvas as a natural part of the Universe, which allowed him to feel the accents of quite a different place on the Earth, Lake Ladoga, Misha's second homeland. Misha brought into his paintings all the beauty of the place: its vibrant sunsets, hills covered with snow, forests and solitary curvy pines, waters and ice, boulders, sedges, and silent fisherman.
The third homeland for the painter is, of course, the city of St. Petersburg and its Pushkin Street, named after one of the most loved Russian poets. Here, horizontal lines of Judea's deserts and Ladoga snows meet the vertical lines of St. Pete's buildings, diagonals of its embankments, bridges and silhouettes of the trees. Here we meet many of his stones' characters, the great city's residents. The first is Alexander Pushkin, whose bronze statue looks directly at Shapiro's home. There is a lot of life around the poet: tourists and locals, men and women, walking, playing with their kids or having drinks. On the other side, in the shade of backyards St. Pete's homeless population is enjoying life in their own way. All these things interest Misha a lot, as they are actually at the heart of his aesthetic program. People inhabiting the city and, primarily the painter himself, become main characters of his creations, along with Judea's golden hills or Ladoga silver plains. But the aesthetics his portraits and genre paintings, i.e. close-ups, is in sharp contrast to the aesthetics of his landscapes. As Misha shifts his gaze from endless expanse to closer objects, in particular, to himself, his paintings become filled with irreverent wit and good-natured humor.
His portraits are always precise in representing the characters, and at the same time they are a grotesque, accentuating their personalities'essence and making their appearances stick to the viewer's memory. Misha brings to canvas himself and his loved ones: his friends, his women and even his grandparents. And how expressive are his fishermen, musicians, scientists, jazzmen, children, Hassidic Jews and even forefathers!
But his animal kingdom is definitely the best. That is where Misha feels right at home. Black and ginger cats, cocks and crows, ducks, goats, lions and even fish rush into his paintings in order to show off and to let us observe their egocentric nature and self-con­ceit. The talent of Misha Shapiro really allows him to pull the viewer into the all-engulfing space of his landscapes as well as to arrest the fleeting nature of a man or of a beast”.