Editor’s note. This foundational essay was written by Liudmyla Tverska (1940–2020), Ukrainian art critic and longtime deputy director for research at the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum. It was originally published in the Petrykivka album (2001) and traces the development of Petrykivka decorative painting from its 18th-century origins through the masters of the 1990s. We publish it here in a lightly edited form to make this important text accessible to English-speaking readers.
The Land of Steppes and Cossacks
Before your eyes endless vistas of steppes appear — with intricate patterns of river flood-lands, torn cuts of ravines, a long train of burial grounds; the riot of colours of dawn and sunset, the haze of noonday mirage, and the eternal silence of the night paired with life’s daylight polyphony.
The history of the territory is deeply rooted in the centuries. Time’s memory has kept the deafening clatter of countless Tatar hordes’ horses, the clank of Turkish janissaries’ damask sabres, the moans and cries of tortured prisoners. In its depths are also imprinted the slow, regular creak of the chumak bullock cart, the powerful rhythm of the Cossack marching song, and the melancholy ballad tune of the strolling, philosophically-minded bandura-player.
Since olden times, the Prydniprovya lands have been famous for their fertility. The water in wells was crystal-clear; rivers and forests teemed with fish and wild animals. Marvellous in its beauty and lavishness, the region’s nature has always attracted and captivated human hearts.
As far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, these lands were chosen by the ataman of the Zaporozhian military forces, Petro Kalnyshevsky, for the Cossacks to settle. His first name has remained, forever, in the name of one of the most beautiful settlements of Prydniprovya — Petrykivka.
The settlement that stretched freely in the middle of the steppes was inhabited by free, non-serf peasants — free of the serfdom yoke. The ever-present spirit of rebellion, the proud awareness of independence and self-dignity, became the prevailing personal features of the inhabitants of Petrykivka. These traits moulded a peculiar type of human being — one capable not only of creating things and treasuring the land’s beauty, but also of expressing this awareness in the subtle lyricism of folk song melodies, the refinement of embroidery designs, and the intricate, multi-coloured painting.
Folk Origins: Mural Painters and Malyovki
The land of Petrykivka has produced more than one generation of folk craftsmen. From time immemorial, Petrykivka fairs have been famous all over Prydniprovya. Peasants came together to buy beautifully decorated ceramic and wooden kitchen utensils, banduras and spinning wheels, skrini — chests and caskets — and richly coloured tablecloths and towels with their flowery vegetable designs.
Of the greatest value were the works by local malyuvalnytsi — the craftswomen busily engaged in painting huts and their interiors. The quick and dexterous hands of these women magicians worked wonders, transforming a poor peasant’s abode into a lovely dwelling, attractive to the eye.
People came from afar with a bow and a request to make their huts beautiful, so that family adversities could be eased there. Looking at the unusual flowers, one could feel one’s heart becoming fonder and full of gaiety.
But there was only a handful of genuine craftswomen, and it became impossible to satisfy everyone who wished to decorate their homesteads. The most resourceful among them began to paint flower designs on paper. These paper paintings, nicknamed malyovki, could be made during any spare time of the year, even in nasty spells of winter weather. In time, those unpretentious works little by little ousted mural paintings and became favourite decorations in Prydniprovya peasants’ everyday life. Even today, in some huts of Petrykivka, Loboikivka, Kitai-Horod, and neighbouring settlements, one can find malyovki placed in the most conspicuous corners — on stoves, in window openings, and on shelves for kitchen utensils.
History has not preserved the names of even the most outstanding craftswomen of the past. It mistreated the creations of their clever hands as well. Those ancient painted huts have not lasted to the present day — to say nothing of the malyovki, which had been created only for a season.
The First Researchers
Only at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — when a broad interest in folk arts stirred up, and not only amateurs began to take notice — did the nameless paintings by the countryside masters acquire authorship.
It was historian and ethnographer Dmytro Yavornytskyi from Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) who revealed the bewitching beauty of the Petrykivka flower to his contemporaries. He became one of the first professional investigators and an ardent collector of works by the Petrykivka malyuvalnytsi.
Other key contributions followed:
- The works of art critic E. Verchenko from Kharkiv, who published the book The Dnipropetrovshchyna Mural Painting in 1930
- Monographic albums of the 1950s by A. Statyva, who paid attention to the creative activity of the leading masters of the older generation
- Fundamental investigations of the 1960s and 1970s by B. Butnyk-Siverskyi and N. Hlukhenska The Petrykivka business is indebted to N. Hlukhenska not only for the propagation of their work, but also for her direct participation in organizational and creative activities.
If you go deep into the sources of the business, you are sure to trace the growth of its roots on the fertile soil of the Zaporozhian Sich art. This developed, on the one hand, from the design traditions widely used by Cossacks for decorating their everyday life and arms; and on the other hand, from the peasant’s understanding and perception of the beauty of the world around.
Nature as the Source of Inspiration
However different they may be in the representation of nature, the masters of Petrykivka painting have always been drawn together by a great love for their region. Their works have been a direct response to their land’s nature — lavish in its riches and variety.
In folk art, the connection of the artist with their homeland is especially strong and direct. The peculiar features of the homeland’s nature have been the source of infinite variations of form, content, pattern, and colour since the beginning of time.
Look closely into the colourful interlacing of Petrykivka painting, and you will feel the fragrance of herbs, berries, and flowers of Prydniprovya’s free steppes. This almost pagan worship of the land’s abundance — peculiar to Petrykivka art — moves Petrykivka painters on and on toward creating an outstanding decorative and artistic chronicle of Prydniprovya’s flora and fauna.
Yet Petrykivka design has never been an immediate reflection of nature’s motifs. The world created by these painters is the result of the creative imagination of folk artists — and that is why that world, bubbling with life and festively beautiful, is so dear to one’s heart.
As if by the wave of a magician’s hand, the fantastic tsybulki (“onions”) and kucheryavki (“curlicues”) blossom out; roses and ferns unfold; fairy-tale Firebirds and turtle-doves, owls and cuckoos fly together; the goldfish swim from the mysterious deep blue ocean. Simple colours begin playing as magic semi-precious stones.
The Three Petrykivka Charmers
Tetyana Pata, Nadiya Bilokin, and Iryna Pylypenko — whose names were the first to become known to the public at large — have been called the Petrykivka charmers. They were three remarkable craftswomen, three brilliant creative individuals, and three trendsetters in the development of decorative painting.
Tetyana Pata
Tetyana Pata was a unique phenomenon even among the most outstanding malyuvalnytsi. She was not only a genuine artist who could create her own pattern in the Petrykivka design — inimitable in its beauty — but also became the founder of the independent school of decorative painting.
Her fate was not fortunate. Tetyana Pata was born to a poor peasant family of eight children. She would have shared the fate of her friends — village labourers who worked hard from morning till night in the ploughed fields and about the house — had she not been gifted by nature and her forefathers.
From her young years, she mastered to perfection the art of painting, decorating huts, stoves, and agricultural implements. One would be fascinated with Pata’s exquisite artistic taste and pictorial skill — with the way she created, though “by eye,” but with great virtuosity, her paradise gardens full of wild and cultivated flowers, guelder roses, and strawberry bushes that she grew with love in her own yard.
Nadiya Bilokin
It is in quite a different way that Nadiya Bilokin perceives and creates her own pictorial world in her decorative panels. She is a real folk master in the felicities of detail and arrangement.
Freely and harmoniously, the unpretentious objects of her pictorial narrations interlace with the richness of the flowery design. The resounding picturesque polyphony of festive processions — of young peasant women, of wedding parties, of matchmakings — was, in her depictions, akin to folk dance melodies, sparkling with gaiety and humour. It is the naive world of kindness and happiness. Only the sincerity of feelings and the openness of her soul could give birth to these bright, colourful pictures of her native settlement.
Iryna Pylypenko
Among the three elders of Petrykivka painting, Iryna Pylypenko is the most conventional. Her art has been closely connected with the sources of Petrykivka painting — with the period when malyovki spoke the language of mural painting, and the wise simplicity of the decorative design matched the monumental significance of every detail.
A genuine realist in her depicting of the Petrykivka flower, a poet aware of “the resilient rhythm of the herb florescence,” she makes her flowery fantasies in accordance with the folk appreciation of beauty.
Thus, huge bright dahlias appear especially smart in her decorative paintings, next to zinnias simple in form and colour; massive dark heads of the tsybulki emerge from behind pinks, as if on purpose, underlining the richness of colouring and the intricate delicacy of the petals.
Other Masters of the Older Generation
Paraska Pavlenko, Nadiya Tymoshenko, Hanna Pylypenko-Isayeva, Palazhka Hlushchenko, and Vasyl Vovk created flowers of their imagination together with the recognized masters. Their creative voices in the enormous chorus of Petrykivka craftsmen do not sound as loudly and vividly as the voices of the famous trio. Yet each of them, singing their own unpretentious tune skilfully, has enriched and diversified the colouring and compositional orchestration of the design.
While viewing the works of the older generation of Petrykivka inhabitants, one cannot help marvelling at the unsurpassed skill and ease with which those simple villagers — who had neither artistic nor general education — conceived and gave birth to those splendid inflorescences. Their faultless eye and dexterous hand allowed them to paint at a single brush stroke and without preliminary drawing both a tender flower’s petal and a flexible stalk of a plant, to render both the resilient hardness of the fruit and the juicy softness of the berry with a mere finger’s touch.
Natural Tools and Pigments
Nature, depicted with such awareness and love by these folk painters, has always been for them not only an inexhaustible source of inspiration, but also a lavish store of materials for their creative work.
The Petrykivka residents got their rainbow-coloured paints out of herbs, leaves, berries, and flowers known since childhood, boiling them down in a special way:
- Red — from cherry juice
- Green — from couch-grass and black nightshade leaves
- Blue — from snowdrop flowers
- Yellow — from sunflower petals, onion peels, and apple-tree bark The paints were dissolved in egg yolk and milk, fixed with cherry gum or white beet sugar. Only in post-war times did watercolours and gouache come into use, and manufactured dyes appear.
Tools were also of natural origin: sticks made of tree shoots, blades of marsh grass — especially of reed mace and rush — self-made cat’s fur brushes, and the master’s own fingers. This scanty set of implements has been used by folk craftsmen to create the vast variety of flowery designs that fascinate us up to now.
Recognition: The 1936 Kyiv Exhibition
Fame has not passed over the Petrykivka elders. Their reputation as magicians and charmers established itself firmly all over Prydniprovya. After the first great exhibition of folk art opened with Petrykivka painters’ participation in 1936, all of Ukraine came to know them, and they won general and unanimous recognition.
Iryna Pylypenko and Hanna Isayeva received First Class Diplomas at the Exhibition; Tetyana Pata and Nadiya Bilokin returned home with the titles of Masters of Ukrainian Folk Art.
This trip to Kyiv was a landmark in the development of Petrykivka business. The contacts with masterpieces of world art, with works by the leading professional painters of the time, and the exchange of experience with folk masters from other regions of Ukraine had a definite impact on Petrykivka painters’ creative energy. The Petrykivka painting itself changed qualitatively — the malyovka, previously used only for decorating a country hut, had turned into a work of art of its own worth.
The Petrykivka School of Decorative Drawing
It was the Petrykivka School of Decorative Drawing, opened in 1936, that played a crucial role in this metamorphosis. Tetyana Pata became its leading teacher for the ensuing years. Whole generations of painters owe her the happiness of opening doors wide to the mysterious and wonderful world of art.
The talent of a painter and that of a tutor, her soul’s kindness — nature endowed this person of rare modesty so generously with these gifts that she won the hearts of her pupils in no time, remaining their only favourite Teacher for life. That is precisely why her pupils and followers speak and write about her with such profound respect and tenderness.
The most distinguished among her pupils include Halyna Prudnikova, Vekla Kucherenko, Yavdokha Klyupa, Ivan Zavhorodnii, Mariya Shyshatska, Oleksandra Pikush, Nadiya Shulyk, Fedir Panko, Vasyl Sokolenko, and Zoya Kudish — their lives and creative work closely connected with their native settlement.
It was in the 1950s and 1960s that, thanks to many exhibitions, Petrykivka art stepped over Ukraine’s frontiers, winning visitors’ hearts. The most talented folk masters were entered into the creative union of professional artists as full members.
Saving the Tradition: Fedir Panko and Vasyl Sokolenko
In the brilliant galaxy of Tetyana Pata’s pupils, Fedir Panko and Vasyl Sokolenko were the most persistent in enriching the Petrykivka painting traditions. They were innovators in the breadth of their minds and creative aspirations. They did much to save the Petrykivka business in the 1950s, when there emerged a real menace — the ousting of self-employed craftsmen’s works from the market because of cheaper industrial souvenir goods.
The Lacquer Painting Workshop
Fedir Panko’s talent for organization came to the rescue. In 1958, he managed to unite the self-employed craftsmen into a lacquer painting workshop at the industrial artel of fine needlework “Vilna Selyanka” (“A Free Peasant Woman”).
Halyna Prudnikova, one of the first participants, recalled that time: “We enjoyed ourselves all right — we used to sit under a tree, and we used to paint and sing with great pleasure.”
The warmth of friendly, family-like relations among the craftsmen helped to overcome many organizational and creative predicaments. Caskets, decorative plates, and skrini (chests) — first made of papier-mâché, then of wood-pulp and pressed sawdust, covered with black lacquer and decorated with flower designs — received wide recognition at exhibitions and fairs.
The Druzhba Factory and the Experimental Workshop
By the middle of the 1960s, the original small group of five had been replenished with new masters, and the amateur embroideresses’ artel had been gradually reorganized into the factory of art handicraft wares “Druzhba”.
Later, in 1970, Fedir Panko organized an experimental creative workshop — his own creation. He remained head of that peculiar creative laboratory, where future creators of decorative painting were polished under his guidance.
In the early 1970s, Vasyl Sokolenko in turn headed the lacquer painting workshop at the Druzhba factory. As leading painter for a long time, he stimulated creativity in the work of the factory craftsmen and refused to allow them to stoop to production-line methods. It was to Sokolenko’s indubitable merit that he encouraged the launching of the Decorative Painting History Museum at the factory — a collection of remarkable samples belonging both to the elders and to contemporary Petrykivka painters. The Museum, which Sokolenko playfully and lovingly nicknamed “a genuine Louvre”, directed the painters toward lofty art and helped preserve the best qualities of Petrykivka design — an author’s individuality under production conditions.
Two Distinct Styles
Equally energetic, with the same level of artistic education and skill, Fedir Panko and Vasyl Sokolenko also set themselves at the top of their voices in creative work. The bright individuality of artistic hand makes their personal manners unmistakable.
Fedir Panko’s painting is rich in colour, big in size, devoid of excessive detail. Reds, blues, and greens — favourite colours of Ukrainian folk art — prevail in his palette, ranging from cold blues and violets up to hot ochres and orange, radiating pulsating joy and creating an atmosphere of genuine festivity. Each work of his is permeated with monumental importance and festive solemnity.
By contrast, the design drawing in Vasyl Sokolenko’s works involves both movement and anxiety, and a play of contrasts in colour choice and scale. Striking is his ability to notice and render the dynamics of the struggle of everything alive for a place in the sun.
Fedir Panko went further in his endeavour to saturate his design with poetic content. He created a panel series devoted to Ukrainian folk songs, in which the language of depiction absorbed melody rhythm to produce an artistic image — as if echoing a song tune, either plaintive and sad, or solemn and heroic, or permeated with lyrical meditation.
A New Generation in the 1970s
The 1970s may be called the period of generational succession, when the Druzhba factory and the experimental laboratory witnessed an unprecedented influx of talented youth.
Every rising generation looks back at the past and points to the future. The creative practices of the Petrykivka painters of the seventies strongly support this idea. As if tired of the innovatory hurry-scurry of their teachers, they stopped abruptly and turned their attentive eyes back to the past — to the sources of the business.
Within this frame, decorative compositions were created by Nina Turchyn, Vira Tezyk, Tamara Kudish, Anatoly and Nina Chernoosky, Nina Gordeyeva, Natalia Kalyuga, Liubov Shtaniy, Mariya Kravets, Uliana Skliar, Vitaly Panko, and Liubov Bai.
But the simple imitation of “Petrykivka” — borrowing its flower motifs while introducing the devices of old folk craftsmen into modern design — was clearly doomed. Both the naive simplicity and humaneness of the malyuvalnytsi’s emotional songs were gone. There came knowledge acquired at secondary and higher educational institutions, professional competence, dazzling virtuosity in mastering skill secrets, and wide opportunities for accomplishing creative endeavours instead. Petrykivka has changed, but has not become worse. A beautiful and tender shoot of the knack to decorate village huts with painting has turned into a fruitful tree of folk art known all over the world.
Andriy Pikush and Hanna Samarska
Among the famous Petrykivka craftsmen that the 1970s produced, four stand out as leaders: Volodymyr Hlushchenko, Andriy and Mariya Pikush, and Hanna Samarska.
Andriy Pikush
Familiarizing oneself with the life and creative activities of Andriy Pikush, one sees the way he absorbed the energy and skill of his immediate teachers — Fedir Panko and Vasyl Sokolenko — and drew upon the creative forces of the Petrykivka elders, with Tetyana Pata’s art in the first place. This amalgamation is especially evident in his earlier decorative panels.
Pikush appears as a more independent and mature master in his constantly enriched series of wooden decorated kitchen utensils. Wood processing — once restored for the Petrykivka business by Fedir Panko — has been perfected by him to a superb virtuosity. He has a fine feeling for the material: while creating wooden flasks, salad-dishes, shtoffs, and small dressers, he appears both as the author of the painting and as the form-begetter. Wooden scullery utensils, once used by Zaporozhian Cossacks in their everyday life, returned from non-existence thanks to him.
In later years, Pikush opened the forgotten area of ceramics for Petrykivka painting and introduced techniques previously unknown — batik and stained glass. The ancient forms of the kumanets, jugs, and kalamarchyk are being restored by Lviv glassblowers according to his sketches.
Hanna Samarska
Hanna Samarska stands out in the series of outstanding Petrykivka painters. She does not come from Petrykivka — she was born in the settlement of Bohdanivka in the Kyiv region. The famous Kateryna Bilokur comes from the same region.
It was the meetings with this famous folk craftswoman — the author of picturesque canvases that sing hymns commemorating the richness and beauty of Ukrainian land — that had a strong impact on Samarska’s life and creative activities. From Kateryna Bilokur, she inherited the worship of her motherland and adoration of everything alive. Her teacher endowed her talented pupil with the knack of noticing every little thing in nature and transferring it onto the canvas with great accuracy.
The pictorial series “The Land of Mine” has been an important — though not the only — part of Samarska’s art. Having moved to Petrykivka, she seemed to adjust herself to the traditional decorative painting in no time. But her decorative panels, plates, trays, and dishes testify to the fact that it is not a simple thing to stick to an accepted tradition while having one’s own artistic outlook.
As a genuine artist, Samarska denies the direct borrowing of pure decorative motifs and plastic devices of Petrykivka painting. With scrupulousness so characteristic of her — with love for the smallest detail — she creates a unique design, as if threading glass beads.
This knack of organic unification of one’s understanding of the world with the centuries-old tradition of Petrykivka decorative painting — keeping and respecting it as the people’s mine of information — was the characteristic feature of the 1970s generation of painters.
1980s: Creative Freedom
The 1980s brought full creative freedom. As if dams were broken, and a swift flood, having gushed into the old riverbed, filled it to the brim with clean, fresh waters. The ancient business became younger and lavishly came into bloom.
Among the works that stand out for their vivid imagination in colouring and arrangement are those by Natalya Rybak, Valentyna Panko, Nadiya Vasilkivska, Valentyna Karpets, Olena Zinchuk, Tetyana Lapshyn, Iryna Nazarenko, and Valentyna Milenko.
But in this gold-field of young, already acknowledged painters, it is the Statyva sisters — Valentyna, Lidiya, Mariya, and Nataliya — that have been sparkling in a special way. They are being predicted a promising future by specialists, who note their mastery growing with the years.
Petrykivka Dynasties
The 1980s and 90s gave us an opportunity of speaking about independent creative dynasties, where every member of a family — young and old — indulged in this ancient folk art. There are many such families in Petrykivka, but among those mentioned most often are:
- The Shyshatskas
- The Pankos
- The Sokolenkos
- The Pikushes
- The Chernooskys
- The Tymoshenkos
- The Statyvas
- The Skliars Thanks to them, new branches of the unique tree of Petrykivka painting are appearing — united by the propinquity of cognate tastes, customs, and outlooks, and, most importantly, by the continuity of the old tradition, handed down from generation to generation, from parents to children and grandchildren with utmost care.
Conclusion
One may get acquainted with the masters of Petrykivka painting not only in Petrykivka. The Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum and the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum possess rich collections of their works. Come into their light, quiet halls and get in touch with a clear source of folk art — the world around you will sparkle in bright colours, and your soul will be filled with light and heavenly feelings.
Petrykivka decorative painting has been considered one of the unique representations of Ukrainian artistic culture. This ancient culture goes back into the depths of history; it has been created over the course of centuries by the talent and hard labour of our forefathers and contemporaries.
This culture has been of genuine national character without any foreign admixtures or influences. It has embodied the spiritual wealth and creative generosity of the Ukrainian people.
Liudmyla Tverska (1940–2020) was a Ukrainian art critic, member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, and deputy director for research at the Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum until 2012. She received the title of Honored Worker of Culture of Ukraine in 2004.