Kseniya Simonova

A friend sent me this link:



I love how she quickly depicts emotion with sand.

According to Wickipedia she was born in 1985 as Ксения Симонова and is a sand animator from Ukraine. She started drawing with sand after her business collapsed due to the early 21st century credit crunch and had been drawing for less than a year when she entered "Ukraine's Got Talent". She became the 2009 Winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent", constructing an animation that portrayed life during USSR's Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich in World War II. She won first place and received the equivalent of $125,000 US dollars.

This is the verbiage that came with the original email: "This video shows the winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine , resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says:
"I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me.. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears.. And there's surely no bigger compliment.""