Meditations From the Roads

I started painting Meditations From the Roads in the summer of 2023.

By then, more than a year had passed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion and I had been constantly on the road.

I have commuted and often traveled by car all my life but this time I was making long trips almost every two months, and a typical one-way drive could be between 600 and 1000 kilometers. Those trips, although having other purposes too, were always and first of all about seeing my wife and kids, spending some time together and then driving back to Kyiv.

I like to be on the road. I always have. A mixture of anticipation of the future and reflection on the past, a possibility to think long about anything, to imagine whatever needs to be, to dream, and most importantly to kind of engage in conversation with great people of the past and of today while listening to books or podcasts.

The road is always there for me as the best space for having conversations with myself. Sometimes I dive deeper into a specific memory, dream, or idea, old or new, or just sketch something in mind and think about it or forget it later. When I drive, I want two things – to arrive as soon as possible to where I’m going and to remain in this state of moving through space and ideas as long as it can last.

Literature has been part of those roads for years too. I can listen to a great book for hours without stopping. I often return to paragraphs and chapters, or specific sentences and phrases again and again, just like someone would again and again listen to a music track she likes (sometimes I listen to the music too when driving but for the last several years it has not happened that often and music remains something I prefer to enjoy when I’m home). I think about the characters, the authors, the worlds in books, and the worlds in the so-called reality I observe. I adore those beautiful moments when I feel the magic of satisfaction from a specific moment in the story, the line, the phrase, the feeling I have about a character and his or her ideas and deeds, the moment of enjoying it as a true moment of life that exists – this feels like a miracle.

Wodeman, Quantum Entanglement, or A Portrait of the AI as A Young Man, 2026. Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm.

Then, at some moment, sometimes in the same or the next “session of driving” within the same or the next long trip, and sometimes when I’m back home from the long roads, all of a sudden (really? maybe vice versa, as a result of being into something for hours, days, weeks, months, and years) an idea of an image comes to me and I go to my studio and paint this idea. A portrait of Hesse’s Magister Ludi or an aftertaste from Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go that somehow happens to evoke echoes of Kafka’s The Castle.

The first works in the series of Meditations From the Roads were more directly connected to the image of the road itself - its lines, colors, surfaces, repetitions, and the faces that seemed to appear from staring at them for hours. Later, the road turned more into a perception of meditation, anticipation of and reflection on anything that comes with the road and goes with the road too, like a breath or a memory which is simultaneously happening, being remembered and being forgotten.

One of the recent and larger paintings - Quantum Entanglement or A Portrait of the AI as A Young Man (my first painting in the dimensions of 2 by 3 meters) - still feels connected to the Meditations From the Roads, but it also seems to lead somewhere else - perhaps toward a new series, or toward another kind of road.