Heritage of Ternopil Region – A Tribute to Ukrainian Culture Painting

I am a Ukrainian artist. I am 28 years old. I was born in Ukraine. I moved to the United States because of the war at home. Now I live in Illinois. My work is a reflection on the human journey, stages of life, choices, processes of self-identification, psychological and emotional states. In search of answers to these questions, I often consider the stages of my personal experience, the stages of my own psycho-emotional state of a person with clinical depression, and I use personal psychotherapy and literature as additional research methods. These methods give an impetus to deeper self-knowledge of oneself and people in general, a better understanding of the normality of various psycho-emotional states. Allopaean women act as a visual image that stretches like a thin thread through my practice. Through the personal experience of my close friend, I know about all the stages of the difficulty of accepting myself in the mirror and in society. In my time, I cut dozens of people who became hair donors to make wigs, specifically for women who had lost their hair. The purpose of depicting alopecia in the paintings is to make this image commonplace for people, like any other. The importance of researching national identity and cultural heritage became important to me while working on the Paw Boxes charity project in 2022, which was to include Ukrainian traditional elements to introduce foreigners to our culture. Faced with the ignorance of my own culture, I began a search through books, museums, and dialogues with the older generation, revealing the true value of Ukrainian heritage and rejecting distorted ideas. Finding elements of the old traditional look, I capture them in my paintings.