Svetlana rushed into the house from her backyard to pick up the phone, and bumped in to the transparent sliding doors. Doctors say it was a brain concussion. Sveta calls it a "momentous accident." Whatever it was, it caused her lost vision for a couple of hours and a constant buzz and chirping in her ears for a couple of months. But what is more significant, when Sveta gained all her senses back, she realized she had no remembrance of anything in physics or chemistry at all. It was a matter of a couple of days before she painted her first picture.

 

Dr. Svetlana says she had no clue as to how to hold a brush before the accident. She remembers her first pictures were drawn with a shaking hand. Every new painting awed her to the conviction that she would not be able to do anything better."I often think that it is not me who is painting. I could never in my life believe I could take a brush and draw something like that. I still can't really believe it," she says. But despite all fears, Sveta is just not able not to give in to a strong drive to paint. She is totally and constantly into it. "I go to bed trying to figure out what I can paint next. I wake up in the morning, and the first thing that comes into my mind is again oils and canvas." Sveta says everything can inspire her, and there are a lot of things that do! Her progress resembles an avalanche. She can paint four, five paintings a week. Once she starts she just cannot stop. "What I like about painting most is all the different ways I can interpret reality," Svetlana says. And indeed, only a few of her pictures could be characterized as realistic. They are rather a colorful and variegated expression of her feelings about reality. "I am not afraid of making a mistake and I am trying to learn things all the time, but there is something inside me, you can call it an intuition, something that tells me what will work."