On the shattered edge of Kyiv, an artist honours Ukraine's suffering
CBC
Roberto Marquez is living with eight volunteers on the dark, ruined outskirts of Kyiv.
Every day, first thing in the morning, four of his newfound friends go and help others dig bodies out of temporary graves — the horrible legacy of the nearly month-long occupation of Irpin by Russian troops.
While they dig, Marquez, 60, picks up his brushes and begins to paint.
He is creating a giant canvas — a tribute to Guernica, Pablo Picasso's celebrated anti-war painting crafted in response to the terror-bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War.
War has a tendency to attract unusual characters — the tourists, the thrill-seekers, the unfulfilled and the thoughtful.
Marquez, who lives in Dallas, Texas but is originally from Mexico City, falls into the latter category — a man upon whom the suffering of others makes a deep, abiding impression.
Every day, Marquez puts on his black cowboy hat and the bandolier belt that carries his brushes before walking down to the now-calm waters of the Irpin River, the scene of desperate winter clashes between Ukrainian soldiers and invading Russians on the edge of the capital Kyiv.
Gingerly, Marquez steps among shattered concrete slabs and spaghetti-twisted rebar, over a series of wooden planks, to the thick, leaning skeleton of what was once the local bridge leading to Kyiv. The locals call it the "bridge of death".
Once there, Marquez begins work on his canvas.
As Russian troops bore down on Kyiv in early March, Ukrainian sappers blew the Irpin bridge to slow the relentless advance. That didn't stop panicked local residents from, in the days afterward, trying to flee to safety on the opposite bank over the tangled remains.
A photo of hundreds of cold, exhausted, frightened people cowering under the bridge's smashed foundations to avoid sniper and mortar fire became instantly iconic in the early days of the war. As many as 290 civilians died in Irpin last winter.
From here, Marquez draws his inspiration.
"When I come on site, I am facing … I come on top of reality," he said in a recent interview with CBC News at the bridge where he has set up his giant canvas. "I cannot paint in a studio. For me, painting [in] a studio is a practice, not a finished piece."
This vantage point among the ruins, he said, makes Irpin's story "real" to him.