Core

There is so much happening around us that I still cannot understand or accept. But what I value most has remained unchanged: warmth of heart, kindness, generosity, gratitude. And, of course, beauty.

The very foundation of everything. The core.

I was looking for a visible form for that.

From the beginning, I knew this painting had to be made on wood. In the culture I come from, wood has been used as a support for icon painting for centuries. I originally commissioned a traditional icon panel with a kovcheg — a recessed area for the image — and wooden battens on the back. But I left, and the panel stayed behind. Here, I eventually found another wooden panel of the right size. I wanted to place on this surface what I hold sacred.

Then came the image itself. The heart is flesh and glass at once: alive, filled with blood, transparent and hard, and fragile. I wanted it to seem as though it were beating, as though the blood inside were thickening and about to break through the thin surface. It can be damaged and repaired, but the mark of the damage stays. It rests on a stone base. And all of it had to be beautiful.

The branches, berries and leaves were gathered in High Park and painted from life, one at a time.

What mattered to me was that these incompatible properties should exist at the same time and read as entirely natural, with neither one cancelling the other.

Technique is no longer a subject of investigation in its own right. It is an instrument. In this painting I wanted the brushwork to disappear: the moment the viewer notices the brushstrokes, the glass stops being glass and becomes a picture of glass.

The flower is not there simply to decorate the heart. It gives the eye somewhere to rest. It allows the viewer to look away for a moment from the intense, almost physically palpable life of the organ, and then return to it. Beauty and unease are present at the same time, but beauty comes first.

I was not trying to illustrate an idea. I wanted to make an image in which the form itself becomes its embodiment.

— Lelya Borisenko, 2026