Lesia Sochor

Lesia sochor is an ukranian American painter, she has a hard time seeing the current news about Ukraine. her parents left the country in 1944, and from there they lived in united states . “I’m reliving all my parents’ stories. Just the other day, I saw a young woman crying and crying She was leaving, and she said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever see my parents again.’ And she had her baby That’s exactly what happened to my mother,” said sochor. She was born in Philadelphia but her parents immigrated to the united states with her older sister Sochor parent never saw their parents again In response to the crisis the museum of Russian icons in Clinton has remounted sochor’s exhibition “pysanka: symbol of renewal” When Russia invaded Ukraine the display which was originally was build in 2020and 2021 was remained in the storage of the museum Sochor’ painting feature Ukrainian easter eggs. The eggs represent wealth, health, fertility, and abundance. In Philadelphia, sochor’s mother taught her how to colour eggs when she was young girl.

“All of the writings on the eggs were directly associated with all the symbology and the allegorical magic that the egg contained,” Sochor said “The egg is a trilogy It’s the shell, right? And then the yolks represent the sun, and the whites represent the moon. So you have this whole universe in this seemingly inanimate object But, of course, it’s just full of potential new life.” In additionl to paintings of pysanky , sochor made a trio of images of a babushkas head in an icon style, on wood with gold leaf and acrylic, with Cyrillic lettering. She made two of them when the conflict stared in 2014, the third one”freedom” with a white babushka is a response to the current war “‘Mir,’ written in the brown babushka, means peace,” said Sochor “The blue one is obviously just tears But the actual title of that is ‘Homeland’ because I was grieving for my homeland then, just as I am now. The last one, the white one, I just finished, and that’s ‘Volia,’ which means freedom.” The first two pieces - Homeland and Peacewere done in 2014 in response to the Maidan Revolution. The third is called Freedom and was done in the last month "in response to this hellish event," Sochor said from her home in Belfast, Maine. Babushka are traditional scarves that are often worn by Slavic women

Sochor discovers different themes in her work and does a serie of similar painting or similar stule that cover a some of the worlds problems. Each person can fing in her work something personal or something that relates to their problems "It is where I have gone every time there has been conflict," Sochor said. "It gives me a sense of doing something. It is somehow empowering. It give me hope. It accesses the deepest parts of myself " As the ukranian conflict continues sochor started to work on another series of paintin using ripped jeans that represent repair and mending. Creating a feeling of hope with the images inside the holes of the ripped jeans that includes a map of ukrain and other relavant images.

"Standing in solidarity with Ukraine is so important," she said.