ODESA, UKRAINE — When Natalia Kormeluk works in her art studio, she’s usually on the phone.
She and her friends ask each other how their gardens are doing; Kormeluk just picked her last tomatoes of the season. They talk about ceramics, discuss their students’ progress and send each other photos of the changing leaves.
But since 2022, Kormeluk’s conversations have become saturated by the realities and fears of a war 5,000 miles away.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine soon enters its fourth year, Ukrainian artists across the world like Kormeluk, who lives in Montgomery County and was born to displaced Ukrainian parents, continue to make art as a form of resistance and expression of what it means to be Ukrainian.
Kormeluk, 78, was born in France and raised in New York, constantly surrounded by Ukrainian culture. She now directs the graduate ceramics program at Hood College and, as an accomplished artist herself, specializes in traditional Ukrainian ceramics. The works that fill her studio, which she has exhibited around the U.S. and internationally, ebb between detailed florals and birds and more abstract designs.
Even before the war, Kormeluk bridged her two worlds, regularly visiting Ukraine to further her practice and teach ceramics to students. Americans now ask Kormeluk why she continues to visit, but she says she’ll find any reason to go back.
“We’re not going to let this war break us,” she said. “I think it’s important to keep going there and keep talking about it, too. I am a diaspora. I am American and Ukrainian.”
Since 1975, Baltimore has been a Sister City to Odesa, Ukraine’s second-largest city and its largest seaport, as part of a program to pair international communities and promote peace. This year, the chapter formally known as the Baltimore-Odesa Sister City Committee (BOSCC) celebrated its 50th anniversary. The volunteer-led group has brought Ukrainian culture to Baltimore through music and art events, business symposiums and fundraising for humanitarian aid for Odesans. In May, BOSCC exhibited Kormeluk’s ceramics and invited her to speak about her experiences in Ukraine.
“We’re punching above our weight class,” said Karina Mandell, chair of BOSCC. “We’re trying to be dynamic in our small but mighty efforts.”
But keeping public attention on Ukraine has proven harder as other domestic and international crises have dominated the news. Mandell says she didn’t expect the pullback in support under Trump’s administration. The committee’s goal is still to help people see Ukraine’s struggle as a fight for democracy — and to understand why the conflict still matters.
For Anastasiia Kolibaba, 31, a painter in Odesa, the war has not only reshaped her life but recast her art. Before the war, Kolibaba says her practice, as well as her personal life, was dreamlike — concentrated on colorful, metaphorical stories through paintings and graphic art. But for her most recent body of work, she wanted viewers to see and feel the war more literally through colorless scenes of battlefields and shadowed figures missing limbs.
“Not many people know where Ukraine is, what it is, or that we have our own language and history,” she said. “Because people in Europe don’t always want to hear about the war, I couldn’t express how I wanted to talk about everything at the beginning. But for artists, there is a natural need to do something to express themselves.”
For father and son artists Igor Antonovich Bozhko and Sergey Igorevich Bozhko, the war has created a shift in perspectives and artistic approaches in their parallel practices.
“All Odesa’s artists happen to be war artists all of a sudden,” said sculptor Igor Antonovich Bozhko, 88. “The war turned us into different people. Our souls, our heads work differently now. When war begins, you give birth to a completely different kind of art.”
Sergey Igorevich Bozhko said the first painting he made during the invasion was a reflection of the war’s terror. But then he realized a new style. When he turned to painting after a career in business, his work resembled reductive, vivid landscapes. Today, he seeks comedy in his work: A finished piece shows a Russian ballet performance with a black body bag at center stage on a frozen lake.
“The contrast I found in the horror was humor,” said the 40-year-old. “You constantly read news about your friends dying and being killed. But I knew humor was absolutely necessary because it is a very powerful weapon.”
“Odesa is still a city of humor,” Sergey’s father added. “This is the capital of humor.”
In another part of the city, Serhiy Paptrotskiy, 70, a professor of painting at the Odessa Grekhov Art College, says he finds release from painting amid the attacks. His canvases often include formless details and geometric scenes brandished with English words, or what he describes as phobias: “invasion,” “terror,” “war,” “tragedy” and “madness.”
“As soon as I put paint on the canvas, I felt better and let go of some tension,” he said. “Ninety percent of what I’m doing is devoted and dedicated to the war, but this art is just for me. It’s my own sublimation.”
Originally from Odesa, Kyiv-based abstract artist Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, 29, centers Odesa and her family memories in her work while also incorporating her own experience from witnessing the war. She says Odesa’s natural landscape reminds her that the city existed long before the founding of the Russian Empire.
“There is one particular landscape in the countryside that I always keep in my mind when I’m painting, no matter what,” she said. “I think each of us who were here before the war started know in our brains, in our perception, there’s hope. It’s this reality check that we’re still here, it’s still us.”
Across her studio, her leaning paintings reflect dreams and imagination through whirls of blurred human-like figures.
“I can’t paint realistically,” she said. “But with one of the explosions here in Kyiv, I remember I woke up and I just started painting. I did my best to reproduce it like a photograph.”
In late August, Kormeluk returned to her classes and her studio in Maryland. But she says the memories of the missile attacks are still fresh in her mind. She recalled clutching a friend in a bathroom, having no time to get to the shelter.
“The [Maryland] studio has come to feel like working in my residency in Ukraine — I try to recapture the feeling of when I was there,” she said. “Somehow, the idea that I would spend time there [in Ukraine] makes a difference to them; the idea that somebody is thinking of them outside the country gives them a little more stamina to keep going.”
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s “Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative” in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.
Comments
Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines.