Oleksandr Balbyshev
Dnipro, Ukraine
About a week before Russia went to war with Ukraine, my family and I left our hometown of Dnipro and moved to a safer place. I also moved my studio and all of my art to the city of Lviv, which is close to the border with Poland. On February 24, I moved to Lviv with hundreds of thousands of other people from Russian-occupied Ukrainian lands.
It was hard in the first month of the war. I never even thought about making art. Also, there were so many other things to worry about. But I then chose to keep making art.
Many refugees and displaced people from other parts of Ukraine live in Lviv, which makes it hard to find a studio to work in. So I'm going to have to work in my room. And I think I'm lucky because my family and I are safe and because I have a job. A lot of people in Ukraine lost everything.
I can't keep making the same kind of art that I did before the war. I gave a lot of thought to how to describe my new feelings. There are so many horrible pictures of war crimes committed by the Russian army. What can a creative person add?
I chose to work on religious themes that made sense of the terrible things people have been through for thousands of years. I am now working on The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.
I sell my art on sites like Artmajeur and on my social media. The art market in Ukraine has collapsed, so the only way for artists to stay in business is to sell their work abroad. People all over the world are doing a great thing by trying to help Ukrainian artists.
Helping a Ukrainian artist means helping a person in need and helping the whole country fight against pure evil that has no place in the world today. Thank you for giving me the chance to show you my work.
About a week before Russia went to war with Ukraine, my family and I left our hometown of Dnipro and moved to a safer place. I also moved my studio and all of my art to the city of Lviv, which is close to the border with Poland. On February 24, I moved to Lviv with hundreds of thousands of other people from Russian-occupied Ukrainian lands.
Oleksandr Balbyshev
Browse the works of Oleksandr Balbyshev
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