Against Stones

Discover the story behind this creation

A humanitarian art therapy platform

👁️ 1 views
😊 Joy
Painting

Joy of colours

by IrynaK

City : Kyiv
Format : A4
Status: : Available
Creative Points: : 88
Time spent (minutes) : 50 min
Created at : 18/01/2026
A collective watercolour born from a painting workshop where twelve palettes passed hand to hand around a table too small for the Podil basement. Iryna proposed a simple instruction: « one joyful colour per turn, without correcting the neighbour ». The result resembles an imaginary garden seen from above — vermilion, cobalt, mimosa yellow, sage green patches overlapping without fighting.

Daylight entered through an oblique skylight; in the deliberately left white zones one can still see fine-grain paper texture and the shadow of the protective mesh on the window after summer repairs. Controlled splashes recall muffled laughter when a cup tipped — a rare moment of lightness, almost guilty, then liberating.

Second reading: the composition forms a stylised map of the quarter — blue at the centre like the Dnieper, oranges at the edge like Podil copper roofs at sunset. The work celebrates fragile joy returning after an alert, when one dares again to mix pigments instead of counting seconds on the stairs. Joy of colours: not naivety, but a collective decision to keep seeing the world in saturation.

Artist Stories

The inverted cup

When the vermillion-colored dish tipped over, everyone held their breath—a wartime reflex, not a painting reflex. Then Iryna laughed, a short laugh that thawed the table. “Leave it, it’s overflowing joy.” We continued passing the palettes around; twelve hands, no ownership of the color. My neighbor from Odesa, on video call, showed his sheet full of blue—"the sea," he said, and we replied "the river" in a faint chorus. My orange area, in the upper right, is the roof of my building at sunset; I see it from the studio skylight. No one wanted to cut the sheet into twelve; we offered it to the collective wall, with a slightly rusty pair of pliers.

Nadia — workshop neighbor

“I photographed the wall of watercolors that same evening. In the photo, you can see the inverted stain in the center—like a burst heart that chose to become a flower. I printed a copy for my mother; she put it on her refrigerator in Podil, next to the shopping list. That’s what resilience is: not a speech, a magnet on a fridge.”

Associated Media

Top-down photograph of large collective watercolor on fine grain paper, overlapping vermilion cobalt mimosa-yellow sage-green washes forming abstract garden map, white zones showing paper texture, blue centre like river, orange edges like copper Podil roofs, paint cups and twelve palettes at frame edge, joy after air raid alert, Podil basement skylight shadow, saturated humanitarian hope.

Short handheld video, watercolor workshop table, vermillion cup tipping in slow motion, participants laughing softly, Ukrainian and French voices off-camera, paint-splattered table, collective joy, documentary art therapy Podil, warm indoor light, respectful intimate framing.

Comments