People ask me why I still paint flowers, faces with closed eyes, blue horizons.
Because I need places where the soul can land for a minute.
Because not every wound wants to be red.
Because beauty is sometimes the only bandage I have.
I stand in the studio and let the colors decide.
Some days the paint moves like water and I follow.
Some days it resists, like a body that doesn’t want to remember.
These works are not here to explain anything.
They’re here to hold—grief, love, fear, the long night, the small light.
I am a woman, an artist, an Israeli—living between sirens and silence.
We’re told to be strong. I try. But on the canvas I allow softness.
Thin veils of white over charcoal faces.
Gold lines like stitches.
Pink blossoms where nothing should grow—and still, they do.
Art is not curing me.
Art is letting me survive.
To sit with the ache long enough that it becomes a shape, a rhythm, a line I can touch.
When a viewer tells me, “I felt something open,” I know the painting did its work.
Not to fix.
To witness.
This is how I stitch memory: layer by layer, breath by breath.
I paint the space between what happened and what we can bear to say out loud.
And if you turn the canvas—yes, actually turn it—you might see another story waiting there, quieter, but still alive.
We are still here.
With trembling hands, steady color, and a promise to keep looking for light.
— Nikita
