I feel a need to share two videos with you that you may or may not have seen already. Even if you have, her work is worth seeing again and again. For me it celebrates amazing beauty through art that cannot be described in words…but felt in emotion. A talent such as this is so extraordinary that it almost leaves me speechless.

This young woman is…

Kseniya Simonova (born 1985 as Ксения Симонова) is a sand animator from Ukraine. She started drawing with sand after her business collapsed because of the credit crunch and had been drawing for less than a year when she entered Ukraine’s Got Talent. She became the 2009 Winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent, constructing an animation that portrayed life during USSR’s Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich in World War II. Simonova won 1,000,000 Ukraninan Hryvnia (approx. USD125,000) for her first place in the show. A YouTube video of the performance has received more than five million hits.

BY FREDDY J NAGER | AUGUST 17, 2009

A beautiful young woman takes the stage of a televised talent competition. In the U.S. or Britain, she would likely break into song or dance or a combination of both. But this is “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” and this performing artist doesn’t utter a sound. Rather, Kseniya Simonova begins to weave a magical story with nothing but dark sand, background music, and her talented fingertips.

Live on stage, the sand animator Kseniya Simonovo wordlessly tells the story of the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, with idyllic scenes transformed into war-ravaged landscapes, civilians fleeing, and a pretty girl aging before our eyes into a grieving old widow and, then, a tomb for an unknown soldier. 

The clear metaphor is that life and all we dream and build is as ephemeral as sand being whisked across a tableau. 

For a finishing touch, Simonova blows out the candle lighting her work.

The entrancing performance moves the Ukrainian judges and audience to tears and a standing ovation, proving there’s still justice — and taste — in some parts of the world, Kseniya wins the overall talent competition, an outcome that could only occur in a culture not completely steeped in commercialized entertainment…

…or steeped in religious extremism that works feverishly to continue to eradicate funding for the Arts in America whether that funding is for teaching, creating or promoting art.

This young woman who lost her job, found this talent while sitting on the beach and in ONE year found herself at this national competition in Ukraine. This is only possible through divine inspiration, and that is not to say from any one god. That wonders exist in abundance on this earth that are not proprietary to one god. That this brings out a yearning for tolerance that is slipping away from us.

Her art portrays the emotions of war that we all need to learn from. Fortunately for Kseniya, she wasn’t born in Nigeria and expressing this talent – for our god-fearing American missionaries would most likely prompt the Nigerian Apostolic clergy to declare here a witch and sentence her to a tortuous death.

My point is this…if only we had a fraction of the energy wrought by power hungry extremists in the world, bent on controlling freedom of thought, expression and invention…can you imagine what good we could do? Instead of spending untold hours, days, weeks, months and years mired in fighting against their desire for dominion – we could be celebrating and enjoying the truly remarkable aspects of life.

If I sound a bit resentful towards these extremists right now, I am…and in these periodic moments I do harbor frustrations towards those who rob us from our ability to focus on the good because their actions require us to monitor the dark side of their intent.