In a quiet corner of Kyiv, where the scent of linseed oil still lingers beneath the damp of basement studios, Canadian artist Elena Voss kneels beside a shattered 19th-century icon, her fingers tracing the fractures in its gold leaf like a pianist reading Braille. This isn’t restoration as hobby or heritage project—it’s an act of quiet defiance. For Voss, each repaired crack in a war-damaged painting is a rebuttal to the idea that culture can be erased by bombardment. “The biggest treasures in my life,” she told CTV News in a rare interview, “aren’t mine to preserve. They’re borrowed from history, and it’s my turn to hold them steady while the storm passes.”
Her words resonate far beyond the studio walls. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third year, the deliberate targeting of cultural sites has evolved from collateral damage to a documented strategy. According to UNESCO, over 430 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed since February 2022—including 127 religious buildings, 101 museums, and 76 monuments. But beyond the statistics lies a quieter crisis: the erosion of national memory. When a painting is lost, it’s not just pigment and canvas that vanish—it’s the visual language of a people’s identity, their myths, their grief, their joy.
Voss, a Toronto-born conservator who studied at the Courtauld Institute and spent a decade restoring works at the Art Gallery of Ontario, arrived in Lviv in early 2023 with a suitcase of solvents, Japanese tissue paper, and a conviction that art preservation is a form of resistance. She now works with the UNESCO-backed Emergency Response Initiative for Ukrainian Culture, training local conservators in micro-suction techniques and reversible adhesives—methods designed to stabilize damage without erasing the history of the trauma itself.
“We’re not trying to make these glance like they were never touched by war,” she explained in a recent interview with the Getty Conservation Institute, where she serves as a visiting advisor. “That would be a lie. We’re stabilizing what remains so future generations can see both the beauty and the wound. The crack becomes part of the testimony.”
This philosophy—restoration as truth-telling, not erasure—marks a shift in postwar conservation ethics. Traditionally, art restoration aimed for invisibility: to make damage disappear. But in conflict zones, a new school of thought is emerging, one that values “honest repair.” As Dr. Ivanna Kryvych, head of the Department of Cultural Heritage Protection at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, told ICOM-CC in March: “When we fill a loss with neutral-toned filler, we’re not just hiding damage—we’re erasing evidence. In Ukraine, the scar is part of the narrative. Our job isn’t to pretend the bomb didn’t fall. It’s to ensure the painting survives to inform us where it landed.”
Voss’s work embodies this ethos. One of her current projects is a 1892 landscape by Ukrainian realist Mykola Pymonenko, damaged when a shell struck the storage facility of the Kharkiv Art Museum. The canvas is torn, the paint flaked, but the scene—a golden wheat field under a bruised twilight sky—remains legible. Using a combination of starch-based paste and finely ground pigments matched to the original, Voss is re-adhering loose flakes while leaving the shrapnel-induced tear visible, framed by a thin border of Japanese tissue. “It’s not about making it whole again,” she says. “It’s about making it honest.”
The stakes extend beyond aesthetics. Cultural preservation in wartime has become a geopolitical lever. Russia’s systematic targeting of Ukrainian museums, libraries, and churches—documented by the Smithsonian Institution—is widely viewed by international lawyers as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian national identity, potentially constituting a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. In response, over 30 nations have contributed to the UNESCO Heritage Emergency Fund, which has allocated $15 million since 2022 for stabilization efforts, digital archiving, and conservator training.
Yet funding remains precarious. While emergency grants cover immediate stabilization, long-term restoration—especially for works requiring years of careful treatment—relies on sporadic donations and university partnerships. Voss herself relies on a mix of UNESCO stipends, crowdfunding through her personal conservation fund, and pro bono support from the Canadian Association for Conservation. “We’re patching a dam with teacups,” she admits, smiling wryly. “But every cup holds water. And every stabilized painting is a vote against forgetting.”
Back in her Kyiv studio, as dawn filters through sandbagged windows, Voss applies a final coat of varnish to a restored icon of St. Nicholas—the saint of travelers and the wronged. The gold leaf now catches the light unevenly, not because it’s new, but because the underlying cracks still breathe beneath the surface. It’s not perfect. It’s not meant to be. It’s a painting that has survived, and in its survival, whispers something enduring: that even in the midst of destruction, humans will kneel in the dirt and put the world back together, one fragile stroke at a time.
What does it signify to preserve beauty when the world is burning? Perhaps it’s not about defiance at all—but about insistence. The insistence that some things are worth saving, not because they are untouched, but because they have been touched, and still endure. If you’ve ever held something broken and chosen to repair it anyway—what did you save, and what did it save in you?
