I look at the sky over the Baltic Sea, where there are constantly passing clouds moving towards the east or coming from there.
Russia that I come from is there, and then more than one and
half a year I, unlike these clouds, cannot travel there.
As of February 24, 2022, my digital feed has been filled with smoke that comes with images from the war that Russia started.
The smoke comes from Ukrainian villages and big cities, from downed planes and sunken boats. The smoke comes with news channels and
stories from the Ukrainian children I teach. The smoke has become bigger than the clouds.
When I started drawing, I studied lots of pictures and learned how to distinguish
the smoke of a forest fire, a volcanic eruption, or a coal-fired power plant from smoke coming from
rockets shelling a city.
The title “Valley of the Winds” comes from Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä from the Valley of the Winds
takes place 1,000 years after the “seven days of fire”, the apocalypse that destroyed the human
civilization and most of Earth’s original ecosystem. In the film, the main character sails on a drone among magnificent clouds that are often indistinguishable from it
overwhelming smoke that swept away civilization.