The day before..

I started this painting the day before the war, on February 23, 2022. It was part of a series about fear, confusion, and the silence before something terrible begins. That night, I added a red stroke to the chest of the figure. It felt out of place, so I tried to scrape it off. You can still see the marks where I attempted to remove it. But then I realized—it belonged there. I decided to fix it the next day. That day never came. The war began. A year and a half later, when I returned to my studio, the painting was still there, in the same place.