STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Stepping into her apartment, nestled by the St. George waterfront, you’re greeted with the fragrance of incense, lush plants overflowing with life by the window sill, and trippy art hung on the wall, giving you the sensation of floating in awareness.
Yet, the journey to this warm healing essence has been profound for Olga Panchenko, an artist hailing from Lugansk, Ukraine, a region deeply scarred by war. Her fate seemed sealed when she was born in 1994 in a war-torn region of eastern Ukraine, where Luhansk — a Russian-controlled industrial city that has experienced significant violence and a rise in death tolls over the past decade — is situated.
“I had to drop out of college because my parents lost their business,” said Panchenko, who goes by the name Si Golraine as an artist. “It was bombed. They had to leave their city and they didn’t have any money to pay for my living or anything, so I had to figure all of that out.”
Painting with electricity
For the past year, Panchenko has been painting on titanium, a metal that conducts electricity, using a brush that applies electrical voltages as she paints.
A decade ago, she was an 18-year-old freshman at the College of Staten Island when she got a phone call of the tragic news from her family back home. Upon dropping out of school in 2014, her journey to sustain her life in the United States began.
“Discovering titanium was life changing. It just absolutely blew my mind,” she said. “You can paint five different colors in a millisecond. There’s so much physics involved … the speed in which you move or the pressure that you put in. It just blew my mind because it felt so energetic and universal.”
Coming from a background in natural healing, she shared that she was already familiar with the tangible effects of frequency and how profoundly it can influence us.
“Every painting that I make is a whole new journey for me,” she said. “There are so many ways to work with the limitations of this medium but also the possibilities.“
Arriving to the U.S.
Panchenko first arrived to the United States at the age of 16 and lived in San Antonio, Texas, with a host family as an exchange student. Her journey began after winning a scholarship from a program called FLEX. FLEX is a highly competitive, merit-based scholarship program funded by the U.S. Department of State. It offers students the opportunity to spend an academic year in the United States with a volunteer host family while attending a U.S. high school.
During the program, she shared that she was not entitled to devoting six hours a day playing piano, as she normally did in Ukraine as a student of classical music. Instead, she started studying theatre, visual arts and guitar to keep her creativity going.
“The variety of things that I was able to do… I played a piano concert with an orchestra, I started playing for a theatre, and I got visual arts education. I was lucky with my art teacher who very was inspiring and open minded. That was a very eye-opening experience for me,” she said. “That’s when I got very interested in formal visual arts education.”
As she delved into modern art and 20th-century art history, she shared that she came to the realization that her classical music education back home had been rigid and intense. She said it put frames around her and made it hard for her to compose music outside of the box, which she struggled with because she always felt this intense need to meet specific standards for her work to be considered good.
She left music completely for some time and delved into visual arts. Before returning home after the program ended, she visited New York City and was captivated by its charm. And after her exchange program ended, she went back to Ukraine… but not for long. Her longing for New York City brought her back, this time as an international student at the College of Staten Island (CSI) studying multidisciplinary arts.
Settling on Staten Island
Panchenko had hopes of finishing her arts education, but instead found herself emptying her college dorm for good after completing two semesters at CSI.
“It was just a very intense time for me because as soon I moved to New York by myself when I was 18 to study in college, the war started in my city in the east of Ukraine. It started way earlier than what we know of the big war now,” she said.
Forced to drop out of school and lose her student visa status within the first year of moving to the city of her dreams, she was left to fend for herself in the concrete jungle.
“The big thing that shifted for me at that time was questioning the world we live in,” she recalled. “When I was growing up, the city I am from went through a lot of wars … the First World War, the Second World War. A lot of the families from my mom’s and dad’s side died from the Second World War, so growing up all of that was felt,” Panchenko said. “But it always felt like we kind of got over it and it’s the past and we are in this new time that is peaceful and normal. So when that war started again, it flipped me upside down.”
Panchenko recalls the next few years being very difficult, so much so that she holds back on sharing much of that time. Barely eating, stressed out, and in constant debt, she shared that her autoimmune disease, lupus, spiked again. She found herself frequently falling sick while trying to find work.
She worked as a bartender for tips because she couldn’t find regular employment due to her status. Eventually, she landed a job at a frequency healing center in Brooklyn. She had visited the center earlier to have an eyelid growth checked, and the holistic doctor had helped her for free. Later, when the owner was in need of someone to work for her, she trained Panchenko and hired her as her assistant.
Art & healing
Panchenko became fascinated with the art of healing. She shared that she found a deep-rooted need to explore it in her art and contemplate how we can evolve and change the world for the better. Over the years, she said she came to understand that the people that are in power aren’t going to all of sudden wake up and change.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said. “It has never happened and it won’t. So the next question is, ‘how can we change?’”
Exploring therapy, holistic healing practices, frequency healing, herbs, and more, she expressed that she began to understand how changing oneself can lead to changing the world — and her art today reflects just that.
“If you look at my art through these years, it’s a literal mirror through how I’ve been growing and healing and changing myself,” she said. “Back then, it was a tool to express the darkness and cleanse the darkness out of me and to somehow have it dissolve somewhere. Then, little by little, the more aware of myself I became, starting with therapy and healing, my art has shifted a lot to what you see now.”
She shared that she started creating art from a place of grounding, peace, and contentment — which made her art change a lot. She experimented a lot with oil painting, acrylics, spray painting, until she stumbled upon titanium.
There are no classes on how to anodize titanium nor are there any classes on how to upgrade the techniques or use different color schemes, she said.
Coming from a classical music background, where she once felt confined by rigid rules, Panchenko now finds herself in the pioneering stages of this new medium of art. She said it feels incredibly freeing and like a discovery.
“Since I was a child, I wanted to make art that is relevant and new, and that’s a really challenging thing to do in the 21st century. It does feel to me like I am working with something that makes that a reality,” she said.
She shared that this reality has materialized not only because she is working with a medium that is new to fine art, but also because of her artwork, which delves into deeper meanings of spirituality today.
“We are starting to understand as humanity that organized religion has done so much damage to us as patriarchy did, so it’s kind of like how do we figure it for our ourselves,” she said. “I am a big believer that any evolution and any enlightenment comes through our personal experience and our connection to ourselves. A lot of my art is about the connection to ourselves as a connection to the universal energy.”
