Painting this series, I slept for 3-4 hours. I know Salvador Dali did so to immerse himself in the plots of his own dreams and transfer them onto canvas.
Some parts of dreams—like mixed memories from the previous day with floral still lifes that I painted at night—can be spotted in the paintings. A strange combination of military routine and art.
Without life, there’d be no stories for paintings. Without paintings, no chance to breathe, left suffocating in the weight of the world.
In the morning, I put on my uniform again and wait for the moment when I could immerse myself in a world where I feel complete.
Without explosions and deaths. With hopes for a calmer future. Only an artist immortalizes the zeitgeist as dictated by the sense of reality.
In these paintings, I filter everything around me through the prism of my perception of everyday life: scrolling a news feed that feels like an endless obituary. Witnessing the slow march toward a Third World War, and confronting the daily nationwide tragedies and wartime losses. Challenge, escape, joy, pain.
The series is about everything that triggers me, and at the same time about the things that inspire me to keep living. Flowers lie at the basis of compositions and the palette of paintings. Flowers embody hope—they bloom regardless of the tragic events around them.
Humanity has never been closer to peaceful coexistence than in the 21st century; at the same time, in a few years, we have approached another apocalypse.
Chaotic strokes and sometimes the incompleteness of paintings reflect the spirit of the time—a time of enduring and fragile stability that we must protect from external aggressors.