(Art courtesy of Gillian Burton)

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, displaying sunflowers has become one of the many ways the world is showing solidarity for the Ukrainian people.

Sunflowers — soniashnyk in Ukrainian — have been grown there since the mid-18th century. They have been an integral part of the country’s economy and their presence in the villages and countryside has made them an unofficial national symbol.

Throughout Ukraine’s history, the flower has been used as a symbol of peace.

In June 1996, to celebrate Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons, U.S., Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers planted sunflowers in a ceremony at southern Ukraine’s Pervomaysk missile base.

The ceremony celebrated Ukraine’s abandonment of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, which it inherited in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union

More than 25 years after that ceremony, Russian and Ukrainian ministers are at war, but the meaning of the sunflowers as symbols of peace has not changed.

On February 24, 2022 sunflowers entered the world’s consciousness thanks to a video clip first posted by Ukraine World. In the brief clip, a Ukrainian woman is seen challenging a heavily armed Russian soldier, insisting he pocket a handful of sunflower seeds so that they’ll grow when he’s killed on Ukrainian terrain. Such is the despair of the nation!

How can we help to re-establish hope and once again have flowers grow in the parched earth of Ukraine?

As artists we love to paint sunflowers.

Please consider donating a framed Sunflower painting to our ongoing show of solidarity at One Street Down in Redmond. The show will start in May and finish in the fall of 2022,  (pieces not sold will be returned to the artist). All paintings donated will be directly attributed to the artist and monies will go for both relief and future re-establishment of a liberated Ukraine via a designated fund at the American Red Cross.

Please respond to Gillian Burton at 541–923–7192 or Kristi Cross at 541–647–2341.

AND THANK YOU.

Print this card and attach to your donation.