In his home in Kyiv, Victoria Grigorieva she continues to paint and wait for her husband, Oleh, to return from the front. «The situation in Kyiv is really very difficult», he says, «with the frost, the continuous power blackouts, the daily difficulties. But I continue with my activities at school. I teach painting in an art institute and my students and I have never interrupted the courses. And then I hold online lessons, remotely, with art students who went to other countries during the war.” Her husband Oleh, 53, is on the Kharkiv front. “At the beginning of the war he signed up as a volunteer himself,” explains Victoria. “Then in 2024 they called him back to the army.” She and Oleh have a son, Kostiantyn, 23 years old. «Kostyantin lives with me in Kyiv, he finished university and now wants to do a master’s degree».
When the Russians invaded Ukraine and the full-scale war began, exactly four years ago, on February 24, 2022, Victoria, a 51-year-old watercolor artist, he expressed his feelings, fear, sadness, desperation on the canvas. She entrusted the description of what the war represents for her, for her family, to color and imagination.
«When the invasion began I was no longer able to paint. The feelings, the emotions had overwhelmed me. And until I began to express them on canvas I wasn’t even able to see the beauty of nature’s rebirth, when spring arrived. At first there was only horror inside me, which then gradually gave way to acute pain. And only later did hope restore meaning to life again.”
From this progression of feelings a watercolor triptych was born, a dramatic and powerful work of art: the three canvases are titled “Horror”, “Pain” and “Hope”. The strongly dark colors of the first give way to the intense red of the second, up to the light that appears on a background of dark clouds, illuminating the natural landscape.
Victoria exhibited and presented this triptych, immediately after having created it, in Italy, in the “FabrianoInAcquarello” event of 2022, international event which since 2010 has attracted watercolorists and enthusiasts from all over the world to the town in the Marche and Bologna. She is a regular presence at the event: this year too, at the end of April, she will be in Italy, as the artistic representative of Ukraine.
The triptych “Horror, pain, hope”.
Victoria shows other paintings inspired by the war in her country: “Blackout. Bridge in Kyiv”represents the ghostly darkness that envelops the passage of cars on a bridge in the capital during the interruption of electricity due to Russian bombings that hit energy infrastructures. «“Spring in Kyiv” and “Hope for a new life” were both exhibited in Italy, at the “UrbinoInAcquarello” festival», he explains.
His thoughts turn to Oleh again. A photo of them shows them together, hugging tightly, her husband in military uniform, both smiling, in love. They have been together for thirty years now. The concern for Oleh who fights on the front is constant.
Four years with the incessant terror of missile and drone attacks. Without any real glimmers of hope still being visible on a diplomatic level, concrete measures of an agreement that will soon lead to peace. The work of diplomacy is at a standstill. The Russian offensive continues massively, hitting the entire Ukrainian territory, up to Lviv, in the west of the country. The Ukrainians are exhausted but resist. And Victoria continues to paint light on the canvas, which gradually takes the place of gray and dark tones. The hope for a rebirth that overcomes the darkness of these years of war.
