Girl With a Gun by Evgeniy Monahov

“A young girl, almost a child, sits on the floor, squeezing into the corner of the wall. She is holding a heavy Soviet TT, a pistol from the Second World War, still appreciated by modern bandits, and her finger is already on the trigger. There is no hatred in her strained eyes, black as coal, rather a request to leave her alone. Her left hand lies limp on top of her strained right, she is not ready to shoot.. not yet.

“Where does the weapon come from in her small hands? Who is her gaze directed at? Who stands in the place of the viewer? The answers to these questions will be different for each of the viewers.

“Pictures are bits of life”, as Sitka Charley, Jack London’s Native American character, used to say. You don’t know what happened before the instant captured in the painting, nor can you anticipate what will happen next. You can only see ‘the now’ - a moment frozen in time, as if caught in amber.” – Evgeniy Monahov