The “Under the Cover of Night” series, begun in 2021, reflects my personal journey through depression. At the time, I was living in Mariupol, experiencing a mix of professional growth and emotional decline. While I saw promising prospects as an artist, feelings of sadness and isolation gradually took hold. My social circle narrowed, family visits became infrequent, and art commissions dwindled. Unbeknownst to me, I was already dealing with the early stages of depression, which deeply influenced my creative process.
Each painting in this series explores the emotions I felt, expressed through geometric shapes and lines. These forms serve as a universal language of mood and symbolism. For example, “Mental Traps” began as an abstract concept, but I later realized it depicted my own struggles.
A key piece, “Resilience,” illustrates this tension. Four vertical rectangles appear stable, but red lines subtly suggest movement and fragility, mirroring the illusion of my own stability during that time. Circles, which frequently appear in my work, symbolize cycles of thought and focus, as seen in the painting “Obsession,” where the circles endlessly loop, representing fixations.
This series is an intimate reflection of my emotional state, with each work capturing a facet of my personal experience. More detailed descriptions of each piece reveal the depth of these themes, which, though originally intended to reflect others’ experiences, ultimately turned out to be deeply personal.
