An Artist Refuge

Slava Ukraini! shroud the gallery's glass doors, a solitary scene of grazing goats, greets the guests along with music. Confident, brush strokes curl muted colors of rustic farm houses behind broken, split-rail fences on a cloudy Carpathian day drawn by an artist sitting in ruined, ravished Kherson - a limping dog of a city with patches of bare skin showing. Other pictures, different story; dark, dreadful, desolate people in burnt, battered, bombed-out cities; children clamber over charred wrecks in streets strewn with bricks and debris. Is the first picture - real or dream? Drawn by an artist 'neath fiery missiles, scene the artist pretends exist to get through one more day of war?