Pink, Green and Teal

60x80cm
Mixed media, giclee, Acrylic, oil, pastels, spray paint on canvas.

Portrait 431.2021

God Bless

Faith's Water

Last

Oil on Canvas, 36" x 60", 2022, St. Louis, MO

The Son

Asymetry

The Maltese Loneliness

In time of Covid 19 I embroidered my embroidered portrait with the text Gonna Stay At Home. This was a fun challenge among artists on instagram. Each artist in his own way edited this text in the face of their artwork.

  

G S A H

stone I

Yellow Sea

I worked on the series «STONE WOMEN» during the autumn until the end of December 2022\. Four months of work allowed me to analyze and explore human moods and reactions to the terrible events of the present, to think about the importance of preserving cultural heritage and the role of women in historical disasters.

In my youth, while travelling my homeland, I got acquainted with the art of nomadic tribes that once lived on the territory of Ukraine. Namely, with their sculptures - the so-called «steles». People call them stone «babas». Usually these are statues of women, and sometimes men, holding a bowl filled with the spirit of ancestors at the level of the stomach. Even generations that lived thousands of years ago realized the importance of preserving national memory.

No matter how much history is rewritten, there is always something «eternal». According to various sources of information, these sculptures are more than a thousand years old. Some of the varieties of stone statues date back to the times before our era. Their image has always been mysterious and full of powerful energy for me. They still stand in the same place proudly, calmly and straight, in humble expectation of peace and justice. Maybe, that is why they are petrified.

> They stood for thousands of years and saw everything. They saw all our wars, repressions, the Holodomor. Now they are witnessing the Russian-Ukrainian war. They are witnesses of decay, witnesses of cynicism. At the same time, they are witnesses of human uplift and human strength.

The collection shows the power of a woman who, despite grief and trials, gives the world a new life. By trials I mean global problems, which are never lacking in world history. No wonder a woman has long been considered the guardian of the family.

It is important for any person, especially for a woman, for a mother, for a grandmother, to preserve her home, to protect her children from troubles and hardships, to keep them warm. It is unbearable painful to watch when someone destroys your home, razing it to the ground. Leaving a ruins and a scorching ruthless fire instead of home warmth.

Tragedies are happening, generations are passing away. Traditions are forgotten, culture is distorted. It is important to pass on your identity to future generations. Do not let them forget their roots. My stone women are dressed in authentic Ukrainian clothes - embroidered shirt. Their chests are decorated with corals. Embroidery, as an ancient craft, for me is a symbol of durability, a symbol of cultural continuity.

People live one day at a time. Without establishing connections between the past and the present, between the present and the future. They establish it only when they lose something.

> «...we establish the importance of the things only when we feel that we lose it. But it is usually too late.»

  
**News of September 2022**

  
The complex of stone women in the city of Izium consisted of eight sculptures. Several of the statues could not withstand the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was destroyed during the occupation of the city.

View the [link](https://culturecrimes.mkip.gov.ua/?p=1602&fbclid=IwAR2Fjl7byC8xgymtfsG3ssoralIJwwfCe%5F98r4GRNNfFVEuhRxwqkMazkSg) of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine on the damage of the Izium Fortress.

Now we are losing priceless cultural and historical artifacts, losing historical and cultural memory. Culture is built for centuries, but destroyed by generations in few years. Why are we still living one day at a time?

Stone Women Nr. 4

DJ King Rico plays a tune for my new series, Portraits: Working Hands.

Tune

Usually the painter has full control over the placing and quality of every mark and element in their work. This instead was creation in a straight jacket. The artist's task was to arrange a piece that worked with the discarded offcuts that were available. Apart from the piece in the bottom left corner that didn't 'look right', there was no overpainting. Given the very unpromising source material, the result has a satisfying coherence as an aesthetic system, which is what paintings are fundamentally.

Forget What You Know

Speeding and roving light captured off the Chicago transit line.

 
 

Visual Poetry:



 
 Commute 

 by Cody Ryan Tippie 

 
 A web of winding rails,

interconnected they mind and weave.

Chancing distance afar cut short,

to commuters time and pace reprieved. 

 
 Of ease to traffics delight;

burden lessened of constructions millwright.

Fortuited cityscapes design overhauled;

to the release of stalled traffic appalled. 

 
 A stop afore; a platform change be it so;

dusked, dirted, stank, and rusted,

lay serviceable amenities in need of grow. 

 
 Persons of all walks standby to catch a ride;

from the disheveled homeless keep,

to the still morning drunken bar peep,

the stunning, but eclectic city thriver,

to the well-made suited office diver,

yet it be to the traveler skimming crown,

or the drugged despot stumbling round;

for mind of manner,

is thus skyway a diverse ubersetzer,

or translator from that of city to town. 

 
 Brown, Pink, Blue, Green, Red, Orange, Purple,

and Black run the lines thick and through; at intervals

unforgiving only frustration, worry, or anxiety might rue. 

 
 Albeit one of these lines is missing,

be it not present; nor exist it not at all.

For what should be the lies of the many;

shrouded within cages of pultrid walls. 

 
 Alas, long a’fore may I have read the station map a’rore,

mistaken be it were to relations that may n’ere have existed yet before.

A few minutes spat;

yet a carriage car arrives of late,

those waiting dashing and running,

to catch a place to sit of din from date. 

 
 Oh be the short commute underway;

of lights flicker and flutter zizzling by,

for lightscapade of the rushing boroughs,

washes away fraughted fret,

from daily endeavors to live or survive.

Commute

Part of a larger body of landscape activated artworks attempting to provide the landscape agency in its own form of communication through the work; and investigate the concept of nostos (νόστος), and my own fluctuating visions of "home."

Kleobis and Biton

The desert has always meant much to us as Arab and Bedouin societies. In this group, the desert was depicted as the silk that led us, despite the difficulties, to adapt to it to face the future and its challenges.

Silk

"Digital painting 2022.

Series: From the Atom, 4\. 70x70 cm,

Giclée print on high quality paper painted in the Procreate program

 Serie: From the Atom 4

This mixedmedia expressive work represents my international backthrough in the art scene.

  
Is inspired by the ancient classical myth of Eracle (Hercules) and the 12 efforts that the hero had to overcome to redeem himself from madness.

  
* _Exhibited in the group show "A Visual Culture" curated by Van Der Plas Gallery in New York in 2021_

"13th Effort"

John Cage once said, "No two Coca Colas are the same." Strictly speaking, space and time are different, so even Coca-Cola, which looks the same, is in fact different from each other. All things are supposed to have unique properties, but commercial products have bugged our senses by making us perceive "different" things as "the same. This trend is further accelerated in the digital space, where we are communicating on a daily basis via social networking services (SNS) using text and visual bases, and the symbolic perception of things seems to be amplified. Recently, our perception of the world has moved to a new stage with the creation of a metaverse, a space that could never have existed before. Here, cyberspace expands and a sense of site-specificity rises digitally as well. The technology of NFT even allows us to treat perfectly "the same thing" as "different.

  
​This work questions the "same thing" and the "different thing" and the uncertainty of our perception. What would happen if we brought the two Coca-Colas described by John Cage into a digital space? Since the metaverse is a space, does it exist in the same way as the real world, depending on its environment? When digital objects are cut out as NFTs, can we say that they are \`really' different? Can we say that what we see now is the same as what we will see the next day? When you know that it is \`real' digital data that lives online, can you say that the data that existed offline was a fake? When you look at the real world again with that sense of being awake, does the Coca-Cola can look different than it did before? The expansion of the senses in the digital space reconfigures the two Coca-Cola cans in front of the viewer, making them multifaceted.

  

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