The world originated in such way is the field of harmony and warmness. Here the life of his characters - sometimes naive, sometimes feeling sad a bit - transits. Any attempt to describe a picture or any other artwork of an artist is an Icarian undertaking. They (artworks) are beyond verbal-script treatment. A total of components from separate images does not provide strict casual determinacy between the picture, its object and name. The name and visual images are rather instruments in a jazz piece, each of them conducting its own theme. Such non-linear composition leaves no place for cold rationalism, discretion or irony. Just a spectator is able to merge these melodies into an emotional 'music of spheres'. Very often, the process is hardly discernible. Zhuravel's artworks have a rare gift of natural and non-forcible exhortation of co-feeling - empathy. Having seen 'a window' (pictures are really some outward or inward windows) with the high sky, with a panorama of sensuous warm existence, a natural aspiration arises to come nearer and to see what is further, beyond the first impression. A fancifully lineated plane turns into an open and multidimensional world, favourably tuned to an entrant. Houses, people, tables, fruits, flowers, chalices, spheres, flying and running machines, birds and fishes are the omens, associative signs of an amplitude of life. They are both recognisable and not at the same time. Pressure of sandpapery flow of everydayness, again and again erasing a particle of our life, is squeezed here by soaring over and in the space. The harmony turns material essence into spiritual images-symbols. Here, within a 'magic sphere' of Zhuravel, it is easy to breathe, here we have no burden of years and days sliding by. It is a wonder, but human measurement is thoroughly preserved nevertheless under such immensity and high degree of generalisation. Being in the large internal scope of works of the artist, an individual does not feel himself a negligible thing; on the contrary, he is commensurate with everything. In author's spiritual scale, the world of internal personal cosmos is equal to the surrounding world.

Stylistically, it is easy to trace the sources that have influenced over the artist. These are icon painting, archaic plastique, Boichuk and his school (the list is hardly comprehensive, but is of no importance). It is much more difficult to foist a living being, represented by creativity of N. Zhuravel, into a qualifying 'cell', into a certain framework. Perhaps, it is poetic figurative speech (realism?), where the truth of correct depiction is forced to retreat by the truth of feeling, by emotional purity of perception; or it is uncanonical spiritual painting, which symbolically depicts divine nature of the life and an individual. Life is the hero of Zuravel's pictures. To bring some gleam of the flame that demarcate inanimate, dead things from the living; to show the world as a living creature perhaps are the goals and sense of the artist's works.

Childhood is a remarkable period, where impressions are pure, where the consciousness perceives the environment directly, without any ready-made schemes and rules. Just the childhood is the time when our feelings are overflow with vitality of everything around us. The childhood goes fast, but each day of it is endless, full of mystery and discovery; it is the time when colours, smells and sounds are perceived very sharply. A wish to represtinate experiences of such strength, to renew inartificial ways of a child lives in each of us. This is 'the way home', a vector and pitchfork of a walk of life. This is in works: 'A Return Home', 'The Way Home', 'Presents for Son', 'Kindergarten', 'A Fly Over a Town'.

An attempt to separate the crux, which cannot be narrated or visualised but experienced only, from transitory husk is a dominant of this creativity.

The time that goes by changes the perception, approaches and estimates. Comparing early works of past years with today's ones, we see changes that took place during these ten years. Figures become slimmer and more dainty; they slowly loss their dense corporeity without losing their marrow. Gravitation is reduced; the space becomes live, flowing and transparent. Strokes of brush become more expressive, explosions of power centres of the colour becomes less constricted. Nevertheless, the harmony does not disappear.

Nothing found and made can be a solid foundation in the art. Experience of discontinuity of reality, most likely, impelled him to include studies of not only internal (personal, emotional), but also outer space together with the time flow in the field of artistic search. Thus, objects, levkas, land art projects have been emerged. 'Transsphere', 'Strata' and 'Sphere Conservation' have appeared. Levkas is an organic thing for M. Zhuravel. Some part of artworks in this style continues a brushwork series ('Still Life Against a Landscape Background', 'Winged Bulls'), while another part appeals to the traditional forms of icon painting ('Crucifixion', 'Diptych', Diptych-2'). A trend to develop rich pictorial possibilities of levkas (a special ground for painting) has initiated nascence of 'Fish', 'Genesis of Sphere', 'Flying Mountain'. Some desire to escape from determinacy of painting rectangle, to reveal essence, base (ground) of things in metaphorical sense. Planetariness of perception is expressed in aspiration of the artist to process not a single stratum of expression, but a plan of general content instead. Zuravel's levkases are like to objects for meditation; they represent natural quids (a mountain, river, the sky, a fish and the like) extracted into an artistic form. Images, deprived of coordinate ties with kitchen-sink, acquire features of archetypes. Speaking more generally, we can say that the artist reconstitutes a spiritual structure of the universe through a notional series of symbols.

Purified powerful tectonics and compression in resolving a surface produces images in the form of truncation where the time has lost signs of its presence. 'Transsphere' project may be used to illustrate geometrical, essential and visual results of the previously mentioned. Its module (a sphere on a trapezoidal support) symbolically represents interconnection and mutual penetration of spiritual and material worlds. 'Spherogramm', a computer programme (a trendiness) suggest different options to master the space. A metaphor, contained in the name of a sphere, is not accidental. 'Nectar Gathering' shows a variant of the happy Earth after the catharsis. This is a world without or rather after eschatological forefeeling and disasters that come true, the world of harmony reborn. This positivism may not be deemed naive, it is convictive by its level of integrity, sensual truth, accomplishment, which are present in each thing made by the Maitre. Rephrasing Brodsky: 'An artist is the eye of ens and its brush'.