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Painnt software1/31/2024 Underground angel … another mural sits in Kolomiets’ studio. “And here it was.” For 40 consecutive days from March to May, he ran art classes in the underground. “We joked that I’d always been dreaming of having a really big studio,” he says. ![]() It was here that Kolomiets set to work with around 15 children. The other was kept free for activities – breakdancing, for example, to try to give the subterranean inhabitants a bit of exercise – as well as some maths, literature and science taught by a woman the children called “Maria Biscuit”, owing to her doubtless sensible notion of resorting to bribery to entice the kids to learn. ![]() One part of the grandiose, lofty halls of the Soviet-era station was reserved for sleeping quarters. The children were always waiting for us on the escalator in the morning – and adults too He decided, with an artist colleague, to go to the nearby Historical Museum underground station, where hundreds of Kharkivians slept during the worst of the bombardment – an experience vividly brought to life in the song Metro by Serhiy Zhadan, the poet, novelist and frontman of the ska band Zhadan and the Dogs. In the meantime, Kolomiets decided that the art classes he’d been holding for kids could not stop. The last among those sleeping there left in August. Kolomiets holds out the twisted scrap of metal to show me: no one inside was hurt, but it’s a reminder of that terrifying period. At one point in March a piece of shrapnel blasted through to the studio. The first civilian killed in the city died in their street. Photograph: Ed Ram/The GuardianĪt the height of the shelling, in March and April, some 50 people were sleeping in the studio. “They helped a lot to keep the place going, and they brought a lot of food.”īlooms not bullets … mural showing a soldier with flowers bursting out of his rifle, coloured in by a young boy called Oleksii. People living and working nearby soon found their way to the studio – including the entire staff of a nearby Turkish restaurant. “As it turned out, all the other shelters nearby were in a terrible condition,” he says. Kolomiets and his girlfriend didn’t have to wait long for company. Just as well: the block, the Slovo Building, originally designed to house Kharkiv’s writers, intellectuals and journalists, who were later brutally purged by Stalin, took a partial hit in the shelling (it is, thankfully, still standing). Kolomiets even evacuated his aquarium and its piscine inhabitants – who are still in residence at the studio – from his 1920s apartment block a couple of kilometres away. They also prepared to sleep there themselves. “It was a bit of a mess, so we started to clean it up, ready to receive people,” Kolomiets says. The quip about the air-raid shelter, though, turned out to be not so much of a joke when they looked at the map of safe refuges the city authorities circulated: the studio was marked on it. ![]() A large table in the main room is heaped with children’s drawings and illustrated books for them to delve into for inspiration – everything from volumes of botanical illustrations to works on Picasso and Egyptian antiquities. Every surface is bright with the traces of old paint, and walls are thickly papered with artworks tacked to sheets of chipboard. What it lacks in natural light – I spot a single window, taped up against the possibility of shattering glass – it makes up for in colour. You can see why: the studio is a labyrinthine, subterranean series of interconnected rooms. ‘It was good to switch off your brain and concentrate on patterns’ … a collage of children painting underground.
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