Since that Saturday — October 7th — everything changed. You feel it in your body. In the quiet that isn’t really quiet. In the way we don’t sleep the same anymore. There are things we don’t know how to say, so they stay somewhere in the lungs. Heavy.
And what do you do when you’re an artist? A woman?
You keep moving. You paint, maybe. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you just sit near the canvas and wait for the feeling to come back. Or for the tears to dry.
I’m not good with politics. I’m not good with loud. But I do know how to make things with my hands. I know how to build beauty out of brokenness.
And in this chaos, I think that’s what women artists do.
We stitch memory. We hold the tenderness.
We talk about grief in pinks and light blues and soft drips of white over layers of silence.
I used to think my work was decorative.
Pretty. Emotional. Soft.
Now I know it’s something else.
It’s survival.
It’s documenting what can’t be posted on the news.
It’s the quiet voice between the air raid sirens.
It’s my way of saying: We are still here.
We’re still human. Still breathing. Still building beauty with these trembling hands.
Sometimes people ask, “How can you paint in a time like this?”
And I answer, “How can I not?”
I’m not painting rockets or barbed wire.
I paint a face — because it reminds me of the softness I don’t want to lose.
I paint flowers — not because I ignore the war, but because I need something to hold onto. Something that’s still alive.
My studio has become my shelter.
Not just from missiles, but from numbness.
From despair.
And every time someone comes in and looks at the work and says, “It makes me feel something again,”
I know why I’m doing this.
I’m not painting to impress anyone.
I’m painting to remember who I am.
To remind others who they are.
We — women artists — we’re not here to scream.
We’re here to hold.
To carry.
To reflect the beauty and the horror.
To make space for what cannot be said out loud.
We create beauty not because things are beautiful — but because they are not.
And that’s why I’ll keep painting.
Even when I don’t know what to say.
Even when it feels like too much.
Because someone, someday, will look at this canvas
and feel
what I couldn’t say with words.
— Nikita 🎨
