It’s not done yet, but I am very backed up in all the sketches I haven’t had time to post and write about. To make up for it a bit, here’s a sneak peek of the status of one of my current paintings!

Oil on canvas, 30′ x 40′

Challenge: no underdrawing pre-paint application

Кошмар (Koshmar)

01 February 2023 – 17 May 2023

Oil on canvas; over 2.2 meters by 2.4 meters (over 7 feet by 8 feet)

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The word “кошмар,” or “koshmar,” means “nightmare” in both Russian and Ukrainian. 

For instance, a Ukrainian speaker in Ukraine might have called it a “koshmar” when bombs fell on a Ukrainian maternity hospital in March 2022. Similarly, a Russian speaker in Russia might have called it a “koshmar” when all Russian H&M stores closed in November 2022. What a nightmare!

In my painting, the left hand figure of blue and white is based on a statue called “The Motherland Calls” in Russia. Excluding pedestals, it is the largest statue of a woman in the world.

The bottom right hand woman and child in my painting are inspired by images from the invasion of Ukraine. She is displaced, as you can see – her world has been turned upside down. 

Look at her face. A dreamscape unfolds before her eyes, but it is not the baby having a nightmare. 

So whose koshmar are we seeing, in which a frozen, isolated heart in a leaking snowglobe is also the moon, pulling the tides past nature’s limits, over homes and lands, flooding the Earth with disregard to all life?

In which a distant spectator sits and stares out from two perspectives, which are in truth only ever one perspective?

In which the massive wave of the Motherland calls and coils and roils with the spikes of a human heartbeat, a heartbeat which flatlines by the time the wave reaches a Mother?

KOSHMAR.

Look at her face.

Koshmar.

When I think of the Ukrainian women I have met and known thus far, I think of quiet strength. Defiance. Women who have been forced to leave Ukraine and who are directly affected by displacement, war, and cultural and literal genocide, have shown me casually, as a matter of fact, that they are not victims. 

One such woman told me, “I am not a refugee. I am a runner.” I asked her – “What did you mean?”

She laughed and explained that it was wordplay. She refused to adopt біженець, the Ukrainian word for refugee, which sounds like “bizhunets”, and instead reworked it to бігун, the word for runner, which sounds like “bihun.”

Now look back at the face of the mother in my painting. 

In her eyes and in how she clings tightly to her child, we can see a shell-shocked woman. 

She has been displaced. 

Her world has been turned upside down. 

However, she is a runner, not a refugee. She will make every sacrifice to protect her child from the ravages and realities of war.

And she knows that the dawn is coming.

As for the cry of the Motherland – an expression designed and molded by a man – look from this blue face to the face of the mother, and back again. 

“The Motherland Calls”? 

And yet I say that absent from this dramatic cry is the silent fire of truly fraught motherhood.

I think there’s a huge rift, a dichotomy, between the idea of the Motherland and real mothers on the ground, who are the ones who lose everything in a matter of seconds.

P.S. –

Question from the audience: “Who is the sitting figure in the back? The one drawn with white lines?”

I welcome others’ interpretations, but I painted the seated figure for two purposes:

1. It’s a clue that the background and the foreground show the same thing – just from two different perspectives at once. A flip, like a mirror, from the pivot point of the spectator. (Not unlike how the orientation of the heart and mother are clues to flip the work upside down.)

2. It brings into the frame observers of the conflict, sitting and watching and hearing about two different narratives, both written from a different perspective, but of the same events.

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Please take your time to process and enjoy Koshmar. If you or any others have any questions or would like to speak to me for any reason, please call or text me at (732) 991-9799 or email me at mlozada626@gmail.com. To view more of my work, please visit the rest of my website at michaelalozada.net.

I invite and encourage you to show my work to anyone whom you would like to share it with. All I ask is that you do not use any of my work to promote violence in any context, and that you credit the painter – Michaela Jane Lozada.

Samples of my sketches made from within church services.

7 August 2022 – Because I have so much respect for Louis who is an amazing artist and friend to all, and because I highly value what he’s created and overcome, and because I know how it feels to make everybody sketches and never get sketched, and because I’m grateful to be working with such incredible creatives, and because I just really wanted to, and because I knew how fun it would be, and because I don’t have a studio space for making LARGE pieces right now, and because of her hair – her hair was so, so much fun.

“Out of Love” (2022), 20-foot by 10-foot digital canvas (small-scale exported version shown here)

This work begins and ends with how terrified and saddened I am as I realize how many cycles humans fall into, and how even the worst of us were children acting out of love, before becoming locked in cycles which evolve from an innocent love. For the entire year this one was in progress, I never stopped seeing new cycles hurting more people in the world around me. I still see new ones every week. It renders me speechless, so I rendered a wordless thing, “Out of Love.”

Note on 20 June 2022: This is my first mural-scale painting made from scratch completely digitally. I am too much of a traditional oil painter at heart to have felt comfortable with the shortcuts that a digital space permits: I have copied nothing, traced nothing, cloned nothing. Consequently, the file is over 46 GB, and I have been unsuccessfully trying to export it as an image for over a day. I am STILL trying, and I WILL figure it out. For now, please enjoy these small screenshots of my mammoth painting. I want to show you “Out of Love” on 20 June 2022.

Note on 25 June 2022: I DID IT. I am still included the screenshots below, but the first image on this page is a PNG image successfully exported from a TIF file exported from a thrice reduced version of a twice reduced version of a once reduced version of a version of the original painting file in which I flattened all my hundreds of layers (and sublayers, and sub-sublayers, etc…) into one layer. (We got off easy! I’d have fought much, much harder to be able to share with you more than just screenshots of a painting which I have been nursing for about a year.)