KHOROVOD (2019-2021)
I wouldn’t say I had it bad—I had health, income, a fulfilling relationship, supportive parents, shelter, relative autonomy. Yet the anxiety, isolation, and monotony of lockdown eroded me. Screens, pixels, video calls, endless doom‑scrolling— war, famine, crisis —filled my days as they dissolved into one another. At night I lay half‑awake, a relentless relay of sensory information collapsing into static, numbing me, ferrying me into digital dreamworlds as if my mind were untethered from my body.

I have a fragment of memory from childhood: sinking beneath a lake’s surface, lungs filling with water before my father yanked me up. This has planted a fear in me—as I clung to the pool’s edges for years, terrified of the uncontrollable chaos of water. Only through countless patient swimming lessons, I learned to trust my buoyancy. In surrender I floated, realizing I’m not so different from water itself.

By adulthood I’d forgotten that trust—in floating among water, and in my art. How do I calculate what makes a good painting? When is a painting finished? Intuition, innate in childhood times, had been supplanted by rationality’s tyranny.

Finishedness became my obsession. In an age when every image seemingly lives forever online, I was taught to become a brand: pick what you want to say, refine it, and stay “complete.” But for me this need for completion, I now believe, was born of fear— fear of judgment, of being seen mid‑becoming rather than in a fixed state. I internalized this, becoming my own harshest critic; every brushstroke felt like a wager against rejection.

The blank canvas overwhelmed me. The infinity of possibilities, the vast spectrum of color and subject was hard to navigate. I needed constraints – systems. Pool’s edges.

It all began with play. In 2019 I returned to painting. Embracing acrylic’s limits, I painted what I saw, translating the dynamism of digital photos taken (often, while intoxicated) during house-parties into paint.

The constraint of a pared‑down Zorn palette—titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, cadmium red— and a handful of brush sizes gave birth to the Khorovod series. Named after a Slavic circle dance that unites movement and song, shamanic themes materialized for the first time in the wake of the pandemic. Fueled by my first forays into psychedelics, the work veered into fluid mindscapes.

What began as lockdown diversion became medicine: psilocybin sessions disrupted habitual patterns of thought and challenged my established beliefs, opening me to metaphysical curiosity. I became aware of how little I really know, unraveling the mystery of existence and painfully humbling self-realizations. My psyche became malleable clay; jagged rocks within—once flaws—were examined, broken down, or integrated as structural reinforcements. Nothing, I learned, is what it seems.

These visions first took shape in painted dreamscapes featuring people in dimly lit living rooms, in whose dissolving forms echoed Witkacy’s mid-inebriation portraits (Bretan, 2022) [1], which were of great influence on me. Yet the true revolution happened in the doing: each new work became a ritual of becoming, a dialogue between raw impulse and disciplined form.

[1] Stanisław Ignacy “Witkacy” Witkiewicz (1885-1939) theorized metaphysical portraiture that uses abstraction to channel inner life. He is famous for his meticulous documentation of substances consumed while creating his works, which can be found as formulas inscribing his works (Bretan, 2022).

References:

Bretan, J. (2022, April 7). Documenting Drugs; The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The Public Domain Review. Retrieved May 8, 2025, from https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/documenting-drugs/