ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 2, 1996 TAG: 9605020007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DEATH PROWLS the paintings by children who live in the shadow of Chernobyl.
Think of dying birds.
Raging fires. Dead trees. And lots and lots of barbed wire.
The images are eye-catching, but bleak - and they dominate "Nuclear Reactions" - a collection of paintings by children living near the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster.
The paintings, on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, are on display at the Salem Museum through May 25.
The 10th anniversary of the meltdown at Chernobyl was last Friday.
The pictures were painted by children living in Minsk - a town in Belarus some 180 miles from Chernobyl. Belarus absorbed much of the radioactive fallout from the meltdown and explosion, which killed 30 people outright and exposed another 5 million to fallout.
Thousands have died since or are now ill with radiation sickness and cancer. The final toll on humanity - not to mention flora and fauna - is not known.
The toll on the children of Minsk, however, is clear enough.
The 20 paintings, all done before 1991 by children ages 4-15, demonstrate a wide variety of skill levels and points of view. But all the paintings share a sickening sense of normalcy turned inside out.
In one picture, the sun weeps.
A second painting shows a babushka, or grandmother, holding her face in the foreground. In the background are rolling hills behind barbed wire. The painting's title: "My Land."
The title of another painting is simply: "No desire to live."
Art often is used as a tool to help children express their feelings about mayhem, said Nan Johnson, a spokesman for the Christian Children's Fund international headquarters in Richmond.
The fund, which does relief work in Belarus, owns the paintings - along with some 1,800 other paintings by children living in troubled portions of the world.
Although the history of the Belarussian paintings is tangled - they were given to the Christian Children's Fund in 1991 by the Children's Fund of Belarus, but are currently on loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which in turn is sending them around the state - they likely originated as therapy for the troubled kids, Johnson said. "Most probably they were done through counseling sessions in which the children were asked to relate their impressions, their fears of what they went through in 1986."
In some of the paintings, fires rage above the nuclear reactors (something none of them are likely to have seen in person, though all of them must have imagined it).
In others, blossoms bloom and birds nest - behind barbed wire and warning signs. In one painting, a blue-eyed child lies in a hospital bed.
Some of the images are grisly. Birds are prominent - flying frantically about a flame-red sky, or strewn dead across a roof.
"The kids seem really concerned with the birds and the animals," said the Salem Museum's director, Mary Hill. "They must have seen a lot of dead animals around."
Death prowls these pictures. The grim reaper himself stands between denuded trees in one of them, his skeletal face staring out from beneath his hooded cape, a sickle in his hand. In another, a death's head floats in flames above the burning power plant.
To some, Mother Nature herself seems suspect. One artist painted a black-finned fish swimming through a radioactive murk of black, orange and yellow flecks.
Others painted pretty landscapes - and dotted them with nuclear warning signs. "You can tell from the pictures what the kids are seeing," Hill said. "I think whenever I look at these pictures, 'How many of these kids are still living today?' It's something I don't want to know."
Despite the underlying horror, many of the paintings are pleasant to look at - full of vivid color, lovely (if unhappy) children, green trees and blue skies. Said Hill:
"I think it's a child's nature to look for the beauty in something."
The paintings wound up in Salem on the anniversary of Chernobyl "as much by chance as anything," Hill said. They were looking for a temporary exhibit, she said, and the Richmond museum had this one available.
Chernobyl was in the news again last week even before the 10th anniversary of the disaster, as a fire raged across contaminated land outside the plant.
"Nuclear Reactions," a free Virginia Museum of Fine Arts exhibit at the Salem Museum, 801 E. Main St., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturdays.
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. A child's painting from "Nuclear Reactions": Theby CNBpictures were painted by children living in Minsk, a town in Belarus
some 180 miles from Chernobyl. 2. Pretty, but deadly: The paintings
wound up in Salem by chance on the 10th anniversary of Chernobyl
nuclear disaster. color.