Mykola

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At first, I didn’t understand that the war had started, I received a call unexpectedly and was told to go to a  safer place. I was confused, no one had expected this. In the very first days, my family and I moved to another place, located away from the city center, and settled down in the basement. We stayed there exactly until the moment when the mine fell on our relatives’ house and blew the roof off. We moved to the house of our friends, but after that incident, I closed myself off and began to panic because the future and  what would happen next were unknown. As a large family,

we were under the constant shelling, amid the rumble of explosions and bombings, for 21 days in a row.

The most awful thing was that many people had to experience the beginning of the war for the second time in their lives, and many of them perished. But one day we were lucky enough to get out of there. It was the second time we were so lucky because my mother worked  in the police, but they (the Russians, Ed.) didn’t notice it at the roadblocks. Now I live in Ivano-Frankivsk, and although the air raid sirens go off here too, it cannot be compared with what happened in Mariupol.

I started creating  drawings about the war after its beginning in 2014.

It was then that my family and I moved from our hometown - Donetsk to Mariupol, fleeing the war for the first time. I was just a child, so I painted mainly the tanks and some scenes from peaceful life, for example, the landscapes. I started attending the art school in Mariupol. When the war came to Mariupol too, I began developing this theme in my art. I put on paper everything I heard or saw. I captured all events in my drawings: the explosions, bombed-out houses, the Russian aggression, and chaos.

I had never painted in this style before – it looked scary.

But I want everyone to see what was happening around me.

For me, it was a kind of calming practice, but I didn’t always paint because of fear or anxiety. Sometimes I was bored, but I also wanted to develop my talent and skills. It is a horrible war, especially in the modern world. Its consequences will be significant, people already have a lot of negative emotions and psychological problems.

I want everything to be peaceful and calm in the future, and I want war not to be “popular” anymore. In particular, for this purpose, I plan to enter the military lyceum to go further to protect us all. Further, I plan to enter the Faculty of Law, and then  I will go to defend our country, whether from the outside or inside. We discussed it with my family, my relatives support me. However, I aspire to develop in the artistic field as well.