About us

"The words are terrible, when they are silent.“

This is how the famous Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko wrote. The poet's sword is the word, the soldier takes the machine gun, and they gave me a brush in my hands. 

For the first time a broken heart, glass all around, a soul full of pain walked barefoot, and I felt a craving for drawing. Then I realized that pain became an engine of creativity for me.

The person who instilled a love of art was my stepdad. I remember the first time he took me to the studio of a friend who was an artist. Everything smelled of paint and inspiration. 

My stepdad died 7 years ago, but when I come to the place where I spent my childhood, inhaling the smell of colors, which remains unchanged every year, I remember the time when we were together. This workshop is located in Nikopol. This is the city where I was born and raised, the city where my parents met, the city that remained home to my mother until February 24, 2022. 

After graduating from high school in Nikopol, I entered the University of Wroclaw and moved to Poland. This is where I spent the last 5 years of my life. Every year my mother came to visit me. Wroclaw became for her a city of happy memories, meetings with me and delicious ice cream, which, despite the snow or winter weather, has always been the main attribute of our meeting. 

On February 24, I woke up to hear instead of the usual "Good Morning" from my boyfriend the words: "Lera, the war has begun." Fear, a sense of injustice, shame for being safe, and there is a war in my country, and the main question is: "how is my mother? ».

The main task for us was to convince her to leave her home, work, everything so native and familiar and move in with me. For her decision to leave Ukraine, I should be grateful to the sirens that sounded without stopping, rocking the house more and more strongly and remembering each time that the danger is very close, right above your head. 

14 days of persuasion and finally my mother is in Wroclaw, close to me and safe. I don't know what was worse for her, waking up and falling asleep to the sound of sirens or living with a sense of shame, considering yourself a traitor for falling asleep in a warm bed when your people have been sleeping for many nights in the subway hiding from bombs.

I don't want my weapons lying silently in a drawer under the table right now. Having the opportunity to help people who are currently suffering because of russian aggression my boyfriend and I decided to offer cooperation with artists from all over the world. Our idea is to create unique T-shirts on which illustrations of our collaborators will be printed under the brand FORUKRAINE.ART

All profits will be transferred to the organization. “....”.

There is a war in the heart of each of us. Let us compete together in the struggle for freedom, and let this T-shirt become our uniform, because death is scary, and in war life is scary, scarier than death.