Sasha Q had to leave all her art in Ukraine — so she made 20 paintings in a month for this show

Like tens of thousands of her fellow Ukrainians, Sasha Q was forced to flee the country after the Russian invasion in February 2022. She had to leave everything behind. But for Sasha, whose real name is Oleksandra Stepanenko, that meant not just leaving her friends and family, but also her art practice, the vast majority of her work, and several works-in-progress.

Before the invasion, Sasha had been working as an artist in Kyiv, showing in galleries and working on mural projects both at home and abroad. Now, that's all gone.

"When I was running away with a backpack, the only thing I could take with me was my talent and my skill," she says.

Now, slightly more than a year after she first landed in Canada, Sasha — who is now based in Toronto —  is starting the process of rebuilding her art career in this country. She was excited to be invited to take part in this year's Toronto Outdoor Art Fair — but she says it was also a bit worrying because, at the time, she didn't actually have any art in Canada to show. Everything she's showing at the fair, all 20 paintings, were painted in the month of June.

"I don't have anything here, so I need to paint everything from scratch," she says. "Everything you see on Instagram, that's my old paintings They're not in Canada."

She says that the breakneck pace wasn't what she was used to, but she didn't really have a choice.

"I [had] a mission," she says. "I need content. Usually I'm not so crazy, but I don't have any other chance to expose [my] art."

Even though it was borne out of necessity, Sasha says she's come to really enjoy the process of working on smaller-scale pieces and finishing them quickly.

"It's very interesting when you start and finish [a painting] in the same day," she says. "It gives you a lot of inspiration. It's like a child is born and raised and you're a witness of the small life that you've [created]. I love it."

As much as she is looking forward to the opportunity to showcase her art, Sasha says she's realistic about how hard it's going to be to build a career in Canada, both because of the challenges faced by all newcomers — and all artists — and because of how her experiences have changed her as a person.

"I went through very hard mental situations," she says. "Imagine seeing your streets of your hometown full of dead bodies and explosions and your friends dying. What can I say? I don't know how I survived this so many times."

"I became very, very introverted because of that. I just feel it's hard to socialize, to start everything from scratch. If you want to move like an artist, you always need to go somewhere: art parties, exhibitions. Right now, I feel a little bit lost."

Her new paintings are part of a series called "Other Worlds," which she started while she was still living in Ukraine. "Other Worlds" draws heavily on themes of retrofuturism and science fiction: reflective orbs hovering above red desert landscape, a distorted figure in front of a vortex. She says that for this series, she took a lot of her visual inspiration from the covers of science magazines of the 1980s and '90s — both the Soviet ones she grew up with, and North American ones like Omni.

"I just love the minimalism," she says of the magazine covers. "I love the colours, and I think it's a look that I would say is timeless."

She adds that, for her, art has always been therapeutic. She's been interested in art her entire life, but started taking it more seriously after the previous Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, saying it was "just sort of an escapism for me." And while the cold, stark look of her new work may not scream "comforting" to most people, for Sasha there is something soothing about drawing from an earlier era, when our digital present was still just a dream.

"We are living in an intersection of different eras," she says. "There was no internet, no mobile phones when I was born. So I just feel some sort of nostalgia for the time that will never be back."

"I was born in the Soviet Union for one year — then it collapsed. Then my country sort of quickly transformed into something else. I've lived through many transformations."

The Toronto Outdoor Art Fair takes place at Nathan Philips Square from July 7-9.