Purple Portrait by Zlata Pelykh

Our consciousness is a strange thing.

Once you let it catch hold of something, you won't be able to shake off the images that will haunt you until the very day you leave.

As long as my memories exist, they will always carry my love for drawing. Since childhood, it has been a manifestation of life for me: if I can create, I will be eternal. As I grew up, I changed art classes and I never managed to get into an art school because I chose music. However, my teachers always complained about the painted corners of my notebooks, where the purple dreams of my imagination settled peacefully.

One day, during a casual conversation with an old friend, my mother learned about an artist who gave private painting lessons. I did not hesitate, going to the first lesson on Sunday, where the task was to paint a stuffed crow with small purple and blue glass balls, which were the most difficult for me. There was a small pattern in the middle of the glass that I couldn't get on paper. The artist told me that I really had potential, but if I wanted to develop further in the artistic field, we had to develop academic drawing more. That's how my Sunday drawings began. On weekend mornings, I would get up at eight, drive 20 minutes, barely opening my eyes, and then paint for two or three hours. I listened to Svitlana Oleksandrivna, hearing stories of her childhood, her youth, how her and her husband's art studio was taken away from them in the Soviet Union. Her husband was a man of extraordinary kindness. I remember that she had portraits of herself in her room, presented by him.

Under those portraits and many paintings, we studied for a long time, and the master kept repeating colour theory, especially the role of the purple colour. And for some reason, in her portrait, she was also wearing purple flowers and a soft lilac colour in the background. Maybe it was her favourite colour? Is it still? For some reason, I keep thinking that if we had met at the same age, we would have been friends.

The last time we spoke was a couple of weeks before the full-scale invasion. I hadn't called for a year and a half before that, because I started university, my first year, and before that everything was a damned COVID-19. I was ashamed that I didn't find the time and then during the holidays, when I called, I found out that Arkadii Semenovych, her husband, had died. Death never seemed to scare me, but after the conversation, tears poured out as if my eyeballs were going to fall out with them.

Now I'm glad he didn't see the school where he used to teach get hit by russian missiles.

Then the chaos, fear, running away, another country. This hell began. And every day it was more and more scary to call. I was afraid to find out something terrible, something that I could hardly stand any more. I pick up the violet-pink phone and look for her number. It's not there. I had forgotten it on a piece of paper in Kyiv, where I was scribbling with a purple pen the last time I spoke to Svitlana Oleksandrivna.

I wish I had the courage to call.