Followed my feelings

Tempera on canvas, 2022
90x40 cm 

This work was created during the beginning of my life in Hamburg, shortly after leaving Ukraine because of the war. At that time I was thinking deeply about families who had lost their homes, their familiar spaces, and the physical reality that once gave them a sense of safety and identity.

Even when people survive, something irreversible still disappears.A house is never only walls. It is memory, childhood, intimacy, routine, emotional geography, and the feeling of belonging somewhere in the world.

The painting was inspired partly by the emotional atmosphere of Marc Chagall’s works. I was deeply moved by the way he transformed loss, displacement, love, memory, and human fragility into poetic visual language. I did not want to directly recreate his style, but I wanted to carry a similar emotional weight and dreamlike emotional movement inside the composition.

The angelic presence inside the work became a symbol of protection, hope, and invisible emotional survival. At the same time, the figures remain emotionally suspended between safety and loss, between memory and displacement.

For me, this painting is not only about war.It is about the psychological experience of losing a physical world while trying to preserve an inner emotional one.

The layered forms and floating composition create a feeling of emotional instability, almost like memory itself drifting between past and present. I wanted the work to feel fragile, human, and emotionally honest.

“Followed My Feelings” became one of the first paintings through which I tried to process displacement, grief, emotional intuition, and the invisible transformation that happens after loss.

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”
— Marc Chagall