Three questions to Myroslava Perevalska

Myroslava Perevalska (b. 1972, Ukraine) is an artist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Growing up Myroslava was surrounded by paintings and art books. She is an established artist with a very distinct style, having received more than 25 awards starting from the age of four.

“Myroslava once confessed to me that when she thinks about drawing, she compares herself to a fish. A fish which does not think about its medium – water – or depth, it simply exists. Art is her element, her “water”, she does not need to think if she is doing the right thing. The art is simply her breathing. Intuition and emotions are what interest Perevalska in art, in addition to the state of rest. The feeling of the inevitability of events forces her to create her paintings, experiencing all events even before they appear in real life. Her mostly figurative art is quite distinct to me in two aspects: her intense red colour and her attention to faces. Both of those have an incredibly strong healing power for the soul.”

By Kateryna Serdiuk

What are the main questions that concern you right now?

I am inclined to answer – war. As a person who wakes up and falls asleep to sirens or explosions, I should have this answer. But I am more concerned about my personal responsibility, my opportunity to join in building our common home. Culture and art lay the foundation, and we must bear this responsibility for what we broadcast to the world in images. We choose the soil; we plant, we water, we grow images of identity for future generations. An image gives rise to emotion; emotion encourages action. My work is sowing visual fields, decorating the world, and filling it with meaning.

Two or three years before the full-scale invasion, I had a premonition, the inevitability of something terrible coming, so my art has changed. I wrote a large series of works dominated by the archaic triad of colours - black, white and red. Then there was a stagnation in my work and gradually I entered a new stage, which I feel was a rebirth through great inner work. Healing comes through pain. The war brought great purification, in addition to suffering - it is a great emotional uplift, faith and conscientious work. I have identified the stages: premonition, stagnation, routine work and germination.

Wars are only the visible part of the iceberg of complex processes. We don’t have time to adapt to new realities, to life in isolation during lockdowns, to constant stress, to life before the unknown, to the new realities of artificial intelligence. We are all on the Titanic now - an image of comfort and luxury before a catastrophe. Man has become a slave to a washing machine, and Jesus has lost to Siri in the election campaign.

Sometimes I have dreams in which I see millions of people who have lost their sight and hearing from new viruses similar to Covid. This even brings the imagination to its knees; a real Armageddon and it confuses me. A new, higher level of voluntary slavery also worries me. This is a time of an illusory presence in the world. People have become less present, less communicative. And this is reflected in modern art. Simple plots and human sensuality have disappeared from it.

Despite everything, I see how a new light is lit, and the silence is filled with the first chords of the Renaissance. It worries me that time is inexorable.

I want to experience a new Great Renaissance

My brain and body are under a constant stress. From Covid, we went to war. Two years locked down, and then war. But I do feel the Baroque uplift. High standards in art should return. I want to experience a new Great Renaissance. There are all the reasons for this. The entire era of global visual consumption should give birth to new forms. I wrote more works before the war. Stiffness, and muteness rarely change into a solitary geyser. Although there are many ideas and images in my head, there is little strength to realise them now. But I shall keep working. Time is the most uncontrollable of illusions, and the clock does not measure time.

As the years passed by, I have seen my nature and realised that there is no need to worry and be ashamed of what YOU want. I do not have loneliness inside, I am happy to always meet with myself. That is why honesty is my only criterion in evaluating artworks, I never rely on the opinion and assessments of society because in fact, all people, like me, are interested in truth.

Games lead to a place from which it is difficult to return.

What are you afraid of?

As a child I was afraid of death and communication with other children. I was also afraid that I was an orange inside and I can be peeled and eaten. Today I am afraid of more banal things.

Once (a couple of years ago) I had a dream that I was reading a book, it was thick and I had already finished it. There was a third left and in my dream, I wanted to turn the pages back, but the book did not turn... And I was immediately seized by panic because I could turn forward, but the paper was blank, someone's hand gave me a pencil and a voice said - write slowly and thoughtfully, because there are few pages and you cannot read and rewrite the previous ones. It was such a clear dream that showed me my greatest fear. Then I remembered it when I was in the Sahara and looked at the sand, which is in constant motion and flows from one form to another. My biggest fear today is the loss of time, meaningless hours and days spent.

Fear of losing time, loss of memory, loss of sharpness of the perception of the world, loss of the ability to see and feel – these are my fear demons today.

My eyesight is falling and this is a catastrophe for an artist, because no glasses give the opportunity to see like your own eyes. I am afraid of losing the ability to perceive the world subtly, in detail: to see millions of shades of colour, smells, sounds. Acute sensuality is my world, like life in different substances, where the blade cuts sharply, where silence can be both dark and bright and has different, and where sounds have various depths of emptiness.

When I feel this fear, the fear of losing sight, I remember one of J.L. Borges interviews, where he talked about what he felt after losing his sight. He says that the greatest happiness is when he dreams of red, because the world of a blind person is a milky dream, and red is the colour of life and he remembers it as emotionally as the period when, as a student, he first read Dante in the original language. Red is life. Therefore, with Red, with Borges, I begin my lectures on colour for students. Red is the colour that I would write with a capital letter. I am afraid of losing the feeling of red, the colour from which all our biological life begins: birth, emotional and hormonal wars, formation, struggle and dying. The archaic triad of black, white and red, where red is movement, and black and white are transition and knowledge of Space.

So my greatest fear is never to see and feel the Red again. I am a synesthetic and therefore it is extremely important to me because every colour is a world of sounds and smells for me.

It is probably the fear of getting lost in space, losing the internal reference point to the lighthouse when your internal GPS structure fails. I orient myself by the colour of smell and sound, it seems to me that the loss of connection between these sensory zones scares me, it is like the destruction of the ideal shape of a ball, which in itself seems impossible.

Where do you get the courage to do what you want?

There was a good joke on this topic - how do you relax? - I don’t tense up. I look at the fence, but I don’t see it, my imagination erases it. In a relaxed state, my courage is the same as in a stressful one. My attitude is that whatever you want to do (as long as it does not harm other people or the environment) – do it and free yourself from restrictions. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing – the birth, the creation? Imagination is my master, I belong to my imagination, to those worlds where there are no doors, walls, where all horizons are levelled and I become the master of emptiness.

Humans have a love for purity, emptiness, immeasurable depths, and in my opinion, our courage is there, it is where we came from and where we will return. Freedivers and people who achieve sensory deprivation know this.

Society, religions, moral dogmas drive us into hundreds of walls, into houses without windows and doors, but it is enough to close our eyes and return to the world of emptiness and boundless illusions. The artist recreates illusions. The greatest courage is to be light and truthful, to be out of time. An artist does not need to prove theories, to confirm inventions with experiments, it is enough for us to say - I see it this way, I feel it this way and I dreamed it or it came to me in reality. The minimum of restrictions makes this profession very attractive. This applies not only to the profession but also to the creative approach as such, where a person relies not on knowledge but on faith in the great world of emptiness, where everything already exists, but you have to broadcast it.

And here it is important to say that one should not pay attention to the audience, because my worlds may not be related to their worlds and it is good and interesting to be different. The whole beauty of art is in deep truthfulness, and for this, you need courage, confidence in your actions (mastery), and harmony with your breathing.

Art is the greatest religion, which is professed by absolutely everyone. I think that I am not the first to think that the influence on the human brain is easiest through visual information, which is why televisions, and then the Internet, changed the course of history so much, audio could not have such an influence, the next step may be the influence through collective smell and taste or it will be a synthesis and everyone will become synesthetics!

Our top selection of Myroslava’s works