My name is Mark Gres. I am an artist from Kyiv. A quarter of a century ago, in the year 2000, I held an exhibition tour in the capital and major cities of Ukraine under the title “The Funeral of the Millennium”. After that, I abandoned painting-thinking it was forever .

But then the war came. And with it, an unemployed, lonely seclusion in a remote village, often without electricity, news, or the sound of another human voice. Painting doesn’t require great expenses, and scratching a pen against paper is possible even by the light of a kerosene lamp. Working every day keeps you from going insane.

I never had a classical art education,so my technique wants mastering . Since my first artistic attempts I have never been interested in depicting objects – I strove to create worlds. Perhaps that is why my paintings are often large in scale and densely populated. The biggest of them, “The Autopsy of Gulliver”, measures 200 by 300 cm. The canvas shows thousands of Lilliputians dissecting the dead giant to prevent his decaying body from poisoning their land with its corpse toxins.

At the exhibitions reviews, I often hear diagnoses like “schizophrenia”, “advanced misanthropy”, or “unhealed teenage complexes”. But I’m completely alright! I love life, my children and my people , my friends, women, boisterous feasts, alcohol – I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. But if it weren’t for my severe spinal problems, at 57, I would feel like a young man.

The only depressing things on me are the emptiness of abandoned streets, the thunder of exploding bombs, the flickering candle tributes on social media, and the looming, inevitable decline of human civilization. Perhaps that’s why my latest series is titled “The Apocalypse Calendar”.