2 thumbs & a dummy

*You have to watch this. I thought it was just amazing! The vid is at the end after the explaination.*

This video from YouTube shows the winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent, Kseniya Simonova, aged 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table and showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a rare one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears. Kseniya won the top prize in the series, about AUD130,000.

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

This outdoor scene is then 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 stands outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye. The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called in The Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed. There were eight to 11 million deaths in the Ukrainian population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says she finds it difficult to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is OK. “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.”