Artist Profile
Tamara Shevchuk
Ukraine
Status: Threatened
“War does not spare anyone” is a declaration that Tamara Shevchuk – a Ukrainian graphic artist, painter, and illustrator who lives in a small town in the region surrounding Kyiv – makes convincingly. Aside from her personal artistic projects, Tamara also studied art therapy and has worked as both an art teacher and art therapist, bearing witness to the effects of war on Ukraine’s hardened soldiers and its youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Her daily life and creative work has been influenced considerably by the events of the 2022 war in Ukraine: a new series of paintings and illustrations chart her experience of living under Russian occupation, and many of her designs feature traditional Ukrainian dress, patterns, and symbols.
The current Russian invasion was not the first time, however, that Tamara’s art and the war in the region became intrinsically linked.
When Russian-backed separatists seized parts of the eastern Donbas region in 2014, Tamara put her background in art therapy to use. She worked with children who were evacuated from the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and soldiers who had fought on the frontlines, helping them channel their experiences into a creative outlet. In 2018, Tamara returned to teaching and working on her own graphic designs, paintings, and illustrations. She drew portraits, still lifes, and nature scenes, and spent long summer days with friends by the lakes and rivers that surround her hometown of Shevchenkove.
Everything changed on February 24, 2022.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February, Tamara made the difficult decision to remain in her town and look after her two elderly parents, even as their home was looted by Russian soldiers and as heavy gunfire rang out in the surrounding streets. She contended: “The more we flee, the more the Russians come.”
For 22 days, Tamara’s town was occupied. The invading soldiers subjected her, and her family and neighbors, to a culture of lawlessness, making the rounds of homes in Shevchenkove and stealing what items of value they could. Among the items taken from Tarmara’s home was the computer that she used primarily for her digital work. Tamara’s freedom to create was suddenly curtailed.
Worse yet, the violence of those weeks of occupation – when several towns across the Kyiv region faced Russian bombardment – arrived quite literally to Tamara’s doorstep: In a surreal and horrifying development, the invading forces in Shevchenkove used Tamara’s neighbor’s garden to station their Howitzers. From just next door to her home, they routinely fired mortars onto the nearby green corridor, one of the designated humanitarian channels used to evacuate Ukrainian civilians. She witnessed first hand that the Russian army did not abide by even its most basic commitments to protect human lives.
Using her Facebook account, Tamara began publishing a virtual diary of her experiences during the occupation, and has continued to post regularly since her town was liberated in early spring during one of the first Ukrainian counter offensives. Her writing reflects on the before and after of wartime, on her memories of a life that seems almost idyllic now in retrospect. She meditates on the idea of childhood, on what summer used to mean to her, and on the weight of so many compounded losses. Her posts also touch upon a feeling of diminished agency. Tamara sometimes questions whether her artistic work is the most effective way she can fight.
Like her writing, Tamara’s art grapples with many of these themes. Childhood is a common feature of her work. One of her recent graphic designs features a young girl wearing Ukrainian national colors, while the heart shaped balloon she holds is pierced by artillery. An illustration from this year shows a child standing as a long-range missile with the words “For Children” emblazoned in Russian barrels towards him, a direct reference to reports that some Russian weapons used against Ukrainian civilians carried this chilling message. Another graphic design from September, titled First Day of School That Never Came, juxtaposes brightly colored figures of children against a photo of a ruined school building.
A broader sense of national identity and the will to fight permeates Tamara’s work as well. Several of her recent paintings and illustrations show women in colorful, traditional Ukrainian dresses. They stand or sit upright, centered in the frame, with facial expressions that speak to the duress they have faced, but also to an immutable power and resilience. One mixed media piece posted to her instagram account in July shows a woman watering a bed of sunflowers as she stands outside the wreckage of a house. In some cases, the medium that Tamara works with is in itself a testament to her resilience; due to the theft of her computer, producing graphic designs was no longer possible and for much of the war she adapted to primarily using pen and ink, colored pencil, and paint.
As the months of the Russian invasion dragged on, the loss of income Tamara experienced from not being able to produce digital work made it increasingly difficult to support herself and her parents. She applied to ARC’s Emergency Fund for Ukrainian Visual Artists, and used the funding she received to purchase a new computer. With ARC’s support, she was able to return to an integral part of her creative work, and was also able to pay for food, fuel, and utilities.
In a written testimony, she stressed the importance of supporting artists at a time like this:
War does not spare anyone, and the cultural front is just as important as the military one. Emergency funding is very needed at this difficult time. Art has the unique power of focusing attention on entrenched problems and can often invoke heated solutions that sometimes produce unexpected solutions, or, on the contrary, provide a welcome distraction from the war for those who are having a hard time. Under the conditions of war, the general public is unlikely to be able to pay for art, which is why it becomes increasingly difficult for us to create. Therefore, the grant support offered by the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) for Ukrainian artists is very important. Thank you.
By Elias Ephron, October 2022. Elias is a senior at Bard College, studying Political Science and Spanish and Latin American studies.
