Nelli Varavva

I painted Sisterhood live at a charity event dedicated to International Women's Day, hosted by 906 World Cultural Center in San Francisco.

I wanted to paint the light tenderness between a couple.Surprisingly, work on this piece took longer then I expected.Whenever people ask me how long it takes to paint a watercolor, I don't have an answer. This is not a mechanical action for me. I want each painting to be a meditation, a spiritual experience, where I’m letting the water guide a part of the process.

A series of paintings, featuring relationships between people of different genders. I painted the series in 2018-2020 as a reaction to the recent homophobic laws in Russia, where I’m from originally.

It is the first picture I painted in 2020. I spent the final days of 2019 and the first day of 2020 at a Vipassana center in California. I passed 11 days in silence, meditating and preparing my mind and my soul for the new year and the new decade. To spend Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve that way was a very challenging but truly astonishing experience Meditation can be a pleasurable practice, as well as a difficult and painful one. A few sad memories arose: I dug into the past, mourned my friends who passed away, I thought of choices I could have made differently. I remembered the people and places I miss. I cradled little inner me, who never got enough of a father's love and support. It was a great meditation practice, complemented with a much-needed tidying up of my mind, which was so tired of anxiety and sorrow. I felt that my tears washed out layers of my heart's past experiences, cleaning it out. Day by day, I observed how my existence turned from being irritated and reactive into being calm and loving. And how my tears are turning into calmness and serenity.

What if death is not the Grim Reaper, but a gentle friend who comes to comfort us and walk us to another place? Mayans in Mexico told me that they view death as a companion, who is always nearby, traveling with them through life wherever they go. I want to look at death with the same acceptance. And when I think of my friends who died, instead of shedding tears, I smile in memory of joy we shared together.

This is a story about a crisis. Pain, rage, and love overwhelm my heroine,
she cries to the dark sky and dissolves into it.

This painting is an illustration of a friend's poem. In the poem, the protagonist suffers a crisis and identifies with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince. Bittersweet thoughts about beauty and impermanence of our existence permeate the poem. The protagonist points to the space surrounding our planet, as a place where we came from and where we will return.