by Jas Keimig

---

Through her depiction of eight Ukrainian families’ remembrances of a home they left behind following Russia’s 2022 invasion, Sofya Belinskaya’s watercolors place the viewer right in the middle of their core memories and concepts of the home. In the case of “Liudmyla, Oleg, Yeva, and Olga,” you’re sitting with the family in their serene yard overrun with cats, books, and plants. Watery yellows, oranges, blues, and reds are suffused throughout, which evokes the feel of an old photograph. 

That painting is part of “Хліб-сіль: Of Bread and Salt,” which is on view at Gallery 4Culture through Jan. 25. The Seattle-based artist’s exhibition is a powerful collective portrait of displacement, memory, and home, based on oral histories of Ukrainian refugees driven from their country after Russia violently invaded Ukraine. Taking its name from the bread and salt Ukrainians offer to visitors to their homes, Belinskaya’s watercolors similarly welcome you to the stories and images most important to Ukrainian refugees who have settled in the Seattle area. 

The project began in June 2022, just three months after Russia’s ground invasion of Ukraine that February. Since then, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that over 6.3 million Ukrainians have sought asylum globally, with Washington alone seeing 16,000 refugees as of February 2023. Having immigrated to the United States from Ukraine 22 years ago, Belinskaya was rocked by news of bombings, destruction, and displacement in her home country. So she turned to what she knew best — art.

“Prior to this, my work focused a lot on making paintings around my own personal history as an immigrant, and I’ve developed a visual language for making memory-scapes and images that try to describe the sense of remembering,” she said. “So I thought, why not start talking to people who have been recently separated from their homes and record or capture their stories.”

Over the past year and a half, Belinskaya constructed the two components of “Of Bread and Salt”: eight exquisite watercolors and eight oral histories. Her work began as a series of interviews with each Ukrainian family, whom Belinskaya connected with through her own personal network or online via callouts on social media. She’d visit each family’s accommodations — mostly in the Seattle area — and ask them a series of questions about what they remembered about their life and home in Ukraine. 

Using the subjects’ stories and personal photographs from their life in Ukraine, Belinskaya composed digital collages of each painting before rendering them in watercolor, incorporating personal objects, flowers, and homescapes unique to every family. She brought a box of 48 colored pencils to each of the interviews and asked the families to choose the colors that most reminded them of home. She used those colors to craft their portrait, incorporating another layer of memory and emotion into each piece.

“I wanted them to see this not as an archive, but as some sort of commemoration of their spaces,” she said. 

That intimacy is evident from the specificity of each portrait — not just how each figure is depicted, but the colors and objects that surround them. In “Fialkora and Anatolii,” the couple dons traditional Ukrainian clothing surrounded by poppies, sunflowers, and personal photos as they sit within the plans for the home they never got to build before the war began. There’s a decidedly culinary flavor to “Liliia, Sergii, Danilo, and Misha.” The family bounds around a room, surrounded by cerulean blues, rusty oranges, and hues of pink and purple as cabbages, potatoes, cakes, cherries, hydrangeas, and glasses of wine float around them.

Belinskaya depicts memory as a sort of amorphous structure we all live in and move through, regardless of where we are. Even though these memories and past lives aren’t tangible, they are still places we can go to — or in the case of the families Belinskaya depicted, paintings they can take in and see for themselves. And that home isn’t found in just a place but in people, in pets, in favorite foods. In a moment where images coming out of Ukraine are of the destruction wrought by war, her portraits offer an alternative for viewers to hold on to.

---

Sofya Belinskaya’s “Хліб-сіль: Of Bread and Salt” is up at Gallery 4Culture through Jan. 25. Access the paintings and oral histories on Belinskaya’s website

---

Editors’ Note: This article was updated on 01/22/2024 to remove the photo attributions at the request of the photographers.

---

📸 Featured Image: “Liudmyla, Oleg, Yeva, and Olga” is part of Sofya Belinskaya’s gorgeous new show “Хліб-сіль: Of Bread and Salt” up currently at  Gallery 4Culture. (Photo courtesy of Sofya Belinskaya.)

---