More than 200 years after Francisco Goya noted the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s armies on May 3, 1808, his groundbreaking work on the horrors of war, Ukrainian artists, illustrators and cartoonists sought to find artistic expression as Russian bombs fell on their country. .
Like other Ukrainians, many artists had to leave their homes – and their jobs – when war broke out.
Andriy Roik, who was born and still lives in Lviv in the west, exhibited at home and abroad before the war. “When the war started, all this [artistic] the process has stopped, “said the 27-year-old. “It was extremely difficult to work and react to what was happening in the country. I volunteered to help refugees who came to Lviv. I volunteered in different places. As an artist, I temporarily stopped working. The war made me act very differently. “
It was a long time before Roik could resume his work and learn to live with the constant sound of air raid sirens, nights spent in bomb shelters, and air strikes that became the new norm.
“At one point, I began to adapt to the war,” Roik said. “It simply came to our notice then. And in my paintings I have a vision of peace. The peace I want to see. ”
Royke’s first painting from the beginning of the Russian invasion, “Apogee under the Question Mark,” presents his vision of a utopian state of peace “after these bloody, inhuman events that are happening now.”
Serhiy Radkevich from Lviv also struggled at the beginning to focus on his art.
“It’s hard to explain,” said the 35-year-old. “It’s a very stressful situation for all of us. I’ve never felt anything like this. “
Radkevich said that in the beginning it was much easier to respond to the war by working with people on “mechanical tasks” such as buying drugs or volunteering, than by creating art. “For me, art is like speech, dialogue,” he said. “And it was very difficult to build that dialogue. You are destroyed from within and it seems you just can’t find a way to talk. “
A few weeks after the war broke out, Radkevich said he was beginning to receive offers to buy his works from Japan, Europe and the United States. He said he had decided to use the opportunity to “show the world the violence and aggression” of the conflict, which he described as genocidal. “We have to show it [the] “Real cruelty, ugly cruelty,” he said.
Darina Momot, 28, is an art expert and co-founder of Cittart, a Ukrainian organization that helps fund and find shelter and resources for artists. It seeks to promote artists, cartoonists and illustrators from around the world and has launched an app where people can purchase the works of a Ukrainian artist with one click. Twenty percent of every sale goes to charity.
“Art helps us realize what we’re going through,” she said. “Art captures people’s experiences… This is important for preserving memory and passing it on through generations in its true form, as art is much harder to manipulate than to rewrite history.”
On the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the Kinder Album, a pseudonym for an artist from western Ukraine, vowed never to leave his country. “I didn’t want to read about the war in the news,” she said. “I felt it was important to stay and experience all these events. I really wanted to experience them. The whole atmosphere of fear, of shelters and threats, of bombings helped me make martial arts.
“That has changed in terms of speed,” she said of her trial. “Since I have to paint now, I don’t have time to think, I have to express my feelings at the moment, because something else will happen tomorrow. I had a lot of time before the war. I’m not doing it now. And when I look at my drawings that I made when the war just started, they capture completely different feelings and emotions than the newer ones. ”
“Drawing war for me is like art therapy,” she said. “First of all, it’s a way to express feelings and emotions. I just took them out of me. And secondly, this is my routine and something I did before the war, so when I do it, I have the feeling that there is no war, that these are peaceful times. ”
Prior to the invasion, the Feldman sisters, Michelle and Nicole – commonly known as the Feldman sisters – street artists, illustrators and cartoonists born and raised in the Dnieper, saw war only in movies. “So, when it started, we started to panic. I knew I had to do something to be busy, so I started washing the dishes. But then I realized that it didn’t help, so I decided to paint.
The sisters, who live in Kyiv, said they had refused the opportunity to leave the country. During the conflict, they made a series of animated cartoons about the war, starring Vladimir Putin. In one part, the Russian president, depicted with a strange square head, has dinner at his monumental long table, with a huge bomb, his inseparable companion.
Cartoon of the Feldman sisters: Vladimir Putin is inseparable from a huge bomb – video
Another imagines Putin’s life in a bunker.
Cartoon of the Feldman sisters: The life of Vladimir Putin in a bunker – video
“Last year we made an animated film about the future, where all people have round heads,” Nicole said. “There is a special machine that makes them square so that they are more suitable for the system. But when they cut off part of their head, they lost a lot of their emotions, such as empathy. That’s why we portrayed Putin this way. “
Momot suggested that during this conflict, Ukrainian artists also regained an identity “stolen” from Putin’s war.
“Malevich, Burlyuk, Sonia Delone, even the Kharkov School of Photography are mistaken for ‘Russian,'” Mammoth said. “Ukrainian art is not known in the world and is associated with Russia.
“Ukrainian artists can finally speak to the world on behalf of the whole nation and create values that will be passed on for many years to come. The horrific events that Ukrainians are facing through art are now taking shape. “
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