"A month in the basement under shelling undermined her health, but did not deprive her of optimism"

Yuliya Tveritina – Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, master of linear painting, graphic artist, and illustrator. Julia is from Kyiv. For many years she has been living and working in Suzhou (China). From the first days of the war the artist began to keep an art diary of the war.

Here I tried to portray Valentina Stepanovna from Bucha, from whom we once rented rooms for summer holidays. I remembered that the house was made of white brick and it was built instead of another, old house that burned down. I remembered that we bought goat milk and cheese from her, then she was still an active cheerful woman in multi-colored dresses. behind the house there was a field where they planted something, it seems potatoes and corn.

Her daughter said that unexploded shells were sticking out of the field, but this did not prevent Valentina Stepanovna from planting something there and grazing her surviving goats. A month in the basement under shelling undermined her health, but did not deprive her of optimism.