Petrykivka - decorative painting

In the 19th century, the village of Petrykivka near the Ukrainian city of Dnipro became the center of a decorative art form revolution, where peasant houses were painted with floral and plant motifs. And even to this day, it's a tradition that lives on.

Craft of Traditional Petrykivka Painting Preserved and Spread by Ukrainian Artists

натисни сюди

There are many phenomena of folk art in Ukrainian culture, which make this culture unique and original among other cul¬tures of the world — Kosiv ceramics, rugs from Podillya, em¬broidered towels and shirts created in all parts of Ukraine are among them. A place of honour among these artistic phenomena is taken by paintings created in the village of Petrykivka, in the land of Dnipropetrovshchyna.

     Styles of painting similar to that of Petrykivka were once called "magic realism" or even "the greater realism" (a term coined by the prominent non-figurative artist Wassily Kandinsky) and are part of what is usually called "primitive folk art," though there is nothing really primitive in this art. "Primitive" artists usually have no formal art education and they create without any constraints of the "academic" rules of art.

    The Petrykivka style of painting is a very poetic view of the world around us, or rather it is a world in itself, a world which is free to interpret the usual things in a very unusual manner.

     Tradition has it that Petrykivka was founded by a group of Ukrainian Cossacks in the eighteenth century and it so happened that soon after its foundation, the village, for some mysterious reasons, began to attract people with artistic gifts who came to settle down there. It is difficult, or almost impossible to tell now what the very first paintings created in Petrykivka looked like, but we can make an educated guess basing our conclusions on the surviving paintings of more recent times, and on the art of Petrykivka of today.

     As a matter of fact, thanks to the watercolours painted by Yevhenia Evenbakh in 1911 and 1913, we have a pretty good idea what the Petrykivka decorative paintings looked like in earlier times. In the interior, the stove (or rather, pich, which in Ukrainian peasant houses served several purposes — for cooking food, for providing warmth in cold seasons, and for resting on it; the pich had a horizontal section like a large shelf, on which one could sleep), was particularly lavishly decorated.

       Early decorative paintings in Petrykivka were mostly murals on the walls of the peasants' houses rather than easel paintings. The folk poetic interpretation of the surrounding world was and is at the basis of the Petrykivka paintings. Stylized flowers and guilder-rose are among the most popular motifs of the murals with even regular thistles and other weeds featuring rather prominently in the paintings.

In all likelihood, for a considerable length of time, paintings decorated only the walls before they began to be done on other materials — paper, wood panels or canvas. Mineral pigments were used for making paints and instead of brushes short lengths of reed stocks, twigs or even fingers were used to apply the paint onto the primed walls, the primer mostly being a thin layer of clay. Egg-based paints were used in later times to do paintings on paper.

       Three colours were predominant — red, yellow (or yellow-green), and dark blue.

       It would be wrong to assume that it was only in the village of Petrykivka that such painting flourished — decorative paintings of a very similar style could — and still can — be found in many other villages of Ukraine. The local styles differ in cer-tain details but they all preserve a number of basic elements and features that makes it possible to recognise them as belonging to one and the same basic style, which was given the name of Petrykivka painting.