Mixed Media

The house I grew up in in Dobropillia, Donetsk oblast, was completely destroyed by Russians in spring of 2026. The war had been reshaping the region for twelve years, and the whole country for the last four.

These seven miniature paintings came from thinking about that place — not the loss exactly, but the texture of ordinary childhood: hot sauce made with my mother during pepper season, a cupid pattern on bedsheets, apricots that tasted better than anywhere else in the world. Tears on a math notebook. The smell of apricot blossom on a spring night. Wood shavings my father tracked in from the balcony. Guitar notation from the years I played classical music at school.

Small memories from a place that no longer exists.

Living under a lot of pressure in 2022 led me to a burnout, but creating this work helped me to face the way I actually felt. Scraping the surface down to the basis and burning the canvas gave the crumbling sense of self a physical form.

As war comes to your life, there is no longer neutral space that would be a refuge from your pain and anger. The world moves forward, but you remain suspended in grief, caught between past and present.

It’s a beautiful day. You lift your eyes to the sun, searching for a moment of warmth. But instead of sunlight, you see tiny drops of blood everywhere. The shattered remnants of panel buildings are all that’s left — fragments of your former life, of a normality that no longer exists.

Some say, “We will rebuild everything.” Yes, we will rebuild the buildings. But we will never rebuild the lives stolen from us. We will never restore the feeling of home, the illusion of safety. And we will never see the faces of those already lost — or those who soon will be, because of Russia.

In this painting, I sought to capture the grief for a lost sense of normality. The translucent tree and the hill crowned with a cross stand against a stark backdrop of green and red, embodying the surreal nature of reality — a world that feels both present and distant, familiar yet alien. The dark stain, shaped like grieving figures, becomes a funeral procession that never ends, mourning not just those lost but the life that once was. A black cloud of smoke, born from the burning of the canvas itself, carries pain into the sky, enveloping a ghostly green moon, as if grief itself has taken form, lingering, inescapable.