International Ukrainian Art Exhibition
At the beginning of 2013 the competition SNAC Ukraine 2012 for Ukrainian artists was announced on Facebook. It was supported by the Consulate of Ukraine in San Francisco, by active artists of the Ukrainian diaspora, and by the Art People Gallery in San Francisco. A great deal of work went into making Ukrainian artists aware of the terms. The competition was open to artists living in Ukraine and abroad. The works were posted on a Facebook page and put to an online vote. The 150 best works went into the catalogue. A jury of art critics — Pascal M., Teixeiry, Ali Meamar, Guy Clement Cohen, Silvana Ambar — together with Yana Parubets of the Consulate of Ukraine in the United States, selected 20 finalists. In February 2013 the originals of these works were presented at an exhibition in Los Angeles, and from 20 to 30 April they can be seen at the Art People Gallery in San Francisco.
I received a visa and was able to present my own work in person at the opening: the diptych “You will grow up, my son, and set out on your road”. It brings together traditional symbolism — the tree of life — with images of parents and child rendered in my own modern style. Embroidery is our origin, and origins mean nothing without continuation. Our ancestors continue in our children.
About the work in the exhibition:
The works in the exhibition are on a free theme. They present Ukrainian artists working in painting (oil, acrylic, collage, watercolour, mixed media), graphics, photography and illustration.
Nataliia Tiahlo’s work “We walk the Crooked Dance” invites the viewer to look at life from the point of view of the Crooked Dance — as an endless movement of rises and falls out of which beauty, spring and joy grow.
My enormous personal thanks to the people who made it possible for me to be part of this celebration.
To Serhii Odarych, mayor of Cherkasy, for financial support.
To Natalka Liapkalo — for the marvellous dress she lent me for the opening: black linen embroidered with red flowers.
To Viktoriia Pankratova for a beautiful hand-made headband with little red apples.
To Natalka Tiahlo for her sincere friendship, her warm welcome, the tours and the good she does. To her mother Oksana and her sister Lesia.
To my beloved Serhii for his patience, and for staying home with the little ones. To Vitalii Lototskyi, who gave me faith that a trip to America was possible, though sadly he did not get a visa himself. To all my friends for their moral support.
Meeting the artist Kateryna Krychevska-Rosandych. California
Kateryna Krychevska-Rosandych is a woman of great energy and positive direction. She enchants you from the first minute; it feels as though you have known each other for a very long time. She is 87 now — the age my beloved grandmother would be. This is how I would have wanted mine to be: cheerful, strong, positive. She lives near San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. Programmers from all over the world dream of getting to that city. But she and her family settled there long ago, when vegetables and fruit still grew on the fields where a whole town now stands.
Kateryna Krychevska comes from a distinguished and gifted family. Her father Vasyl Krychevsky and her grandfather Fedir Krychevsky — founder of the Ukrainian style in architecture and the first artist of our national cinema, an original painter and innovative graphic artist, a stage designer and a master of the decorative arts, the author of the design of Ukraine’s national emblem, the Tryzub, an art historian and teacher, the elder of the powerful Krychevsky family of artists — a deeply charismatic figure of the whole of twentieth-century Ukrainian art.
When I was a girl, my teacher Viktor Klymenko held up the work of Fedir Krychevsky (the brother of Kateryna’s grandfather) as an example to me. It was an honour to be a guest in her home. An outstanding painter and teacher, one of the founders of our national realist school of painting, Fedir Hryhorovych Krychevsky played a notable part in the artistic life of Ukraine from the beginning of the twentieth century until the Second World War. Only there did I learn that Fedir Krychevsky had studied in Gustav Klimt’s studio, and that his triptych “Life”, made under Klimt’s influence, entered the history of Ukrainian art.
Kateryna told us many interesting stories — about paintings, about the family. Her whole home is filled with joy and calm.
