Beata Kurkul

Biography

Beata Kurkul made her first drawing on this subject right on a cardboard box. She and her husband were raising money for a collimator sight for a border guard, Roman Dumyak, who served at the Krasna Talivka checkpoint, and from a photograph on social media she drew a cartoon of him on the packaging.

She was born on 21 January 1979 in Vilnius, into a Polish family: her mother was a chemist, her father an engineer. She was named after her father’s favourite actress, Beata Tyszkiewicz. In 1997 she graduated from an art school, but chose medicine for higher education, at Vilnius College, and worked for some time as a nurse. Around then she returned to her childhood hobby of drawing: she had become a fan of “Star Wars” and began drawing fan art of it. On fan forums for the franchise she met a Ukrainian from Kyiv, her future husband. At the end of 2004 she went to Kyiv to visit him; later, choosing a country to live in, they decided to stay in Ukraine. Language was decisive: Beata spoke Russian, and understood Ukrainian because of its similarity to Polish, which she also spoke. In Kyiv she took a job as a concept artist in the video game industry and in time rose to art director. In 2008–2011 she worked at ERS Game Studio, in 2011–2018 at Rightcom United LP, and since 2018 at GrandMA Studios, whose products include the “Mystery Case Files” series.

When Russian armed aggression against Ukraine began in 2014, her husband started helping the military as a volunteer. At first Beata helped him a little, then took up the work fully. When Ukrainian border guards in the Luhansk region came under sharp public criticism for their alleged hesitancy, the couple concentrated on helping them in particular: they obtained helmets, body armour, optical devices, medicine, uniforms and footwear.

Her first serious drawing appeared after a visit to a military hospital: she drew a Ukrainian border guard, and other works followed. One motive, as she said herself, was the wish to tease her Russian acquaintances. Popularity, by her account, came after her drawings were reposted by the Right Sector page on Facebook. Several dozen exhibitions have been held over the years. They include one at Boryspil Airport in 2015, at the Kharkiv opera house and at the Kuindzhi Center for Contemporary Art and Culture in Mariupol in 2016, at Palanok Castle in Mukachevo in 2017, in Izmail in 2019 and in Chop in 2020. After the full-scale invasion began she regularly took exhibitions to frontline towns. In mid-2023 her works were shown in the courtyard of the Seimas Palace in Vilnius, the Lithuanian parliament building, and in one of the city’s biggest shopping malls. She often visits places where border guards are stationed, holds exhibitions there and collects subjects: she watches their service, looks at photographs and listens to their stories.

Among her works, some became noticeably more popular than others: “Daddy’s Daughter” (a border guard with his little daughter), “Life Goes On” (a girl in a border guard’s beret), “Defending the Border” (three border guards and a dog beside a border marker), “Paladin” (a soldier with a sword) and “Paramedics” (a military paramedic with angel wings). In 2020 two albums of her works were published, “Always on Guard” and “Four Elements of the Border”. In 2021 the publishing house Vydavnytstvo brought out the comic book “On a Big Land”, about a wounded Ukrainian soldier’s return to civilian life; Kurkul made the drawings for it.

On 25 August 2015 a monument was unveiled at the Krasna Talivka checkpoint to four border guards who had died in a battle with a Russian reconnaissance and sabotage group exactly a year earlier; she developed the sketch for it.

In 2022 she published drawings about the war created with the Midjourney neural network, and this brought her still greater fame. She does not, by her own account, strive for photorealism; conveying emotion and atmosphere matters more to her, and for that she often turns to mythological and magical motifs. She is often called a Lithuanian artist, but she considers herself a Ukrainian one.