For Aurora-based painter Lyudmila Agrich, the war in Ukraine strikes close to home. Raised in Odessa, the impressionist-expressionist artist grew up near the Black Sea with Russian as her mother tongue. She emigrated to the United States in 1992, and has never returned to Ukraine. Agrich speaks with a heavy Russian accent, and as a U.S. citizen and an American artist, she enthusiastically gives voice to the freedom of expression.

The painter’s solo exhibition titled “Texture” opens Saturday, May 11, at Mirada Fine Art Gallery in Denver. The exhibit showcasing 16 of Agrich’s new — some with still-wet paint — palette knife paintings will show through June 9.

“It’s exciting, but it’s also exposing,” Agrich said, admitting some pre-exhibition anxiety.

“Lyudmila gets nervous before an opening. She’s intense,” said Steve Sonnen, owner of Mirada Fine Arts, a LoDo gallery named by American Art Awards among the top 25 galleries in the U.S. every year from 2021 to ’23. “Lyudmila’s passion for her artwork is evident in each painting, and that is why she has garnered such a devoted following of collectors.”

Agrich’s vast and varied subject matter includes marinas, cityscapes, dancers — ballet and tango — and florals. The artist works in oil paints — lots of oil paints slathered thickly as frosting on a cake — in a technique known as impasto.

“I tried acrylic, but it’s not organic. With oils, even bright colors I feel it’s part of nature. Acrylic is like A.I. It’s plastic,” Agrich said. “I’m not happy with acrylic because it dries very fast. I like painting with oils to mess with strokes. I feel oil better. For me, it’s important to have the way I paint be 3D. I sculpt my paintings.”

Agrich accomplishes her sculptural paintings by using not brushes, but palette knives — the thin, flexible blades typically used for mixing paint. While palette knives readily create lush texture, the tools pose limitations, too.

“The challenge is less control, but this challenge, I like it, because it makes me grow in style,” Agrich said. “It’s very often I can start with one thing, and I cannot have a picture in my mind of how it’s going to be. It feels like my knife dictates what it’s going to be.”

Agrich paints on stretched canvas rather than board: “On board with a knife it’s too hard to paint. The surface is too hard,” she said. “Canvas is kind of bouncy, and I like that.”

Trained as an architect, her most popular paintings are her compelling cityscapes. “I do love architecture, and I like to paint cityscapes the most, it’s true. A cityscape is full with life,” she said. “But it’s not interesting enough just to have a café with a red awning. People are the energy which makes the city alive.”

Norman Mejia has purchased six Agrich paintings for his art collection.

“I happened to walk into Steve’s gallery and saw a painting of a couple dancing tango in front of a church,” said Mejia, who had lived in South America. “When you look at her art, something makes it look like actually living in the moment, feeling like it’s alive, a part of a memory.” 

Mejia also owns several Agrich seasonal works. “They’re so lively,” he said. “She has mastered the ability to express the intensity of what she is feeling or seeing.”

The Mirada exhibition spotlights Agrich’s wide-ranging subject matter, as well as her inventive full-spectrum coloration.

“My palette is changing all the time, constantly,” the artist said. “One year, I’m more in warmer colors, reds. Another, purple. Or every color. I don’t know what it is, but something inside pushes me to reach for certain colors.”

An homage to her homeland’s flag and fields, she painted “Thoughts of Yellow and Blue,” a voluptuous composition of  sunflowers and sky.

“I did paint the sunflowers in honor of Ukraine. It’s an agricultural country — so many fields and very fertile soil. Sunflowers, wheat, you name it, everything grows over there,” said Agrich. “You put a stick in the ground, and it grows.”

Yet for Agrich, Communist oppression stunted her growth. After earning her degree in architecture, she found the profession disappointingly more technical and less artistic than she anticipated.

“But in the Soviet Union, it was like, OK you’ve chosen something, and you stick with it forever because our society was built this way,” said Agrich. “When the Soviet Union collapsed, people tried to do whatever they want to do, to make their own businesses. It was kind of free. People didn’t know what to do.”

Agrich knew what she wanted to do. “I was always painting since I was little, but I started to paint more, to do portraits,” she said. “It was a time when we were close to immigration.”

Agrich’s immigration experience was a cultural shock. “It was completely different,” she said of arriving in Colorado. “You need to adapt. Find a profession. You have no English. Nothing.”

In the U.S., she worked as an architect for six years, specializing in renderings. But her heart was in art.

 “I got serious about painting. I found a gallery,” she said. “The guy quickly made me a gallery partner, as well. He was painting with the palette knife. I didn’t have any style. I just painted whatever I feel, whatever I wanted. So I started to paint purely with the palette knife, and I found this is me.”

Agrich adopted a painting method known as “Alla Prima,” or, “All at Once.”  

“To get the fresh look and also the emotions, it’s easier to get in a zone for hours when there’s no distraction,” she said. “This is when magic happens, and it’s a pure form rather than trying to reproduce emotions the next day.

“The way I express myself, I can paint anything. But for me, it’s more important to catch a feeling of whatever I paint. What people like my paintings very often, of course, is the way I paint, but more importantly they can resonate with the feelings, my feelings I put in my painting.”

For the artist, the war in Ukraine stirs up a dark palette of feelings. Agrich has a lighthearted, melodic laugh, yet also struggles with the stress of war in her homeland.

“Of course, as soon as the war happened, I was so happy I am here and not there, not just because of the literal violence going on, but because in America we have what many people take for granted: freedom,” she said.

“It’s so painful, not only because in Ukraine, the people are suffering. It’s because it provokes all my memories of living in the Soviet Union and everything that wasn’t right. I was against that society — not the Russian people, but the society that was created by Communism.”

The war burdens the artist, though most of her family now lives in the U.S.

 “When you are in shock and you feel the story, when you have empathy towards the victim country, you feel hate,” she said. “It’s already two years, and I started to realize half a year ago that the hate that’s inside of me over everything Russian kills me.”

For the artist intent on painting emotions, the feelings grew untenable.

 “I live in a country which has much more freedom compared to Ukraine, but I became a slave of my own emotions that I created in myself by hating. I think for me it was a great lesson overall,” she said.

“It’s the same with this country what’s going on in an election year with all the polarization. It’s not a physical prison, but when you hate, you can be not free.”

She urges Americans to find relief in art. In beauty. In creative expression. And in global solidarity.

“With art, you can put down your weight and surround yourself in beauty, but you still have to go back to reality,” she said.

“I don’t think it will happen with America what happened to Ukraine with differences, but you never know what could happen to you, to your country. From this point of view, I would say that maybe it is a long way for Ukraine to become as free as America, but at least they started already this journey. And with this war, I thought, myself, I’m a person of the world, not that I belong to any one country.”

For Agrich, art heals, and she continues to work out her angst in her art, painting her way toward inner peace.

“I could have this kind of feeling when I start to paint, first some emotions like aggression, and I can start with bold strokes,” she said, “but the more I paint, the more this energy goes away and transforms into something lighter.”

In addition to Mirada Fine Art Gallery in Denver, Lyudmila Agrich is represented by Smith Klein Gallery in Boulder and Raitman Art Galleries in Vail and Breckenridge.