Little Red Shoes or My First Red Shoes

As a child, I attended an art school affiliated with the Kyiv Academy of Dance. During breaks I would often wander into the shared hallways and see dancers wearing all kinds of beautiful footwear—sometimes pointe shoes, sometimes elegant dance heels. Even the shoes they wore when leaving the academy after training seemed special to me: graceful and refined, or sometimes old and worn, as if they had already lived a life of their own.

Their legs, hairstyles, posture, and presence were, in my eyes, the embodiment of femininity. Watching them, I would think: this must be what a real woman looks like. I was about eleven years old at the time.

The small shoes depicted on this canvas carry those childhood memories within them. Their red color symbolizes the transformation of a girl into a woman, much like an ugly duckling becoming a swan.

It is not an easy journey, yet in the end we all go through it. Somewhere behind us we leave those little red shoes—scuffed, stained, and worn from the road. They may no longer be beautiful in the way they once were, but they remain deeply important, marking a profound inner passage from one stage of life to another.