For a group of Ukrainian women, painting is a form of therapy to help them cope with loss
KYIV, July 14: In a sunlit art studio in Kyiv filled with easels and canvases, Iryna Farion puts the finishing touches on an oil painting with a predominantly dark color palette in shades of blue and brown.
The artwork depicts two intertwined trees held together by their roots, as though in embrace, and a radiant yellow sun shining against a moody blue background.
“I feel like it’s me and my husband, who was killed in the war,” Farion says of the trees. “They are like two souls, like two hearts, like one body.” Farion is among thousands of Ukrainian women who have lost their partners in the war Russia launched against their homeland nearly 17 months ago. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed on the battlefield – most of them men who once led ordinary lives before dropping everything to join the fight for their country.
Farion’s husband, Oleksandr Alimov, died in December after being shot on the Donetsk front line. Overwhelmed with grief, she says she has found some consolation in painting alongside other women who lost their partners on the battlefield.
The women are part of an art therapy project called “Alive. True Stories of Love,” which seeks to honour the memory of those who died while helping the women cope with the pain of their loss.
Alimov voluntarily joined the army in the early days of the war after working as an IT specialist for a well-known company. “I don’t want us to live in a country where we are not free,” Farion says her husband told her before going off to war. The couple had been together for 10 years.
She still wears her wedding ring, while his hangs around her neck on a chain. “I can’t take off the ring yet,” she says. “It feels better for me this way.” On a recent day, Farion visited the art studio with her friend Olesia Skalska, whose husband was killed in January. The two women initially met at a cemetery, a place where Ukrainian widows commonly find solace in each other’s company and form friendships bound by shared grief.
Skalska’s husband, Roman Skalskyi, 26, also voluntarily joined the military without prior combat experience.
“Of course, I supported him because he went to defend me and his whole family,” she says.
The couple was supposed to celebrate their first wedding anniversary in June. But instead, Skalska works on a painting – the only place where they can be together again. “A man is carrying a girl across a field of wheat that has been cut, and I imagine that he is carrying her so that she does not prick her legs,” says Skalska, 24, describing her artwork. Her voice occasionally breaks into sobs as she speaks. “To others, I may seem like an ordinary person. But no one knows what’s happening inside,” she says. “It’s impossible to escape.” The art project was launched in January by Olena Sokalska, who lost her husband years ago in a car accident and says she understands the emotional journey of widowhood. (AP)
A child floats down the Chattahoochee river, in Helen, Georgia, on Thursday. (PTI)
