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Farmer’s Field. 1949. |
When
Pablo Picasso, who was not very generous in lavishing praise on others, saw
some paintings by Kateryna Bilokur, a painter from a small Ukrainian village
with no formal art education, at a 1957 exhibition in Paris, he exclaimed:
“She's a genius! Her works must be made known to all the world!”
Kateryna Bilokur was born more than a hundred years ago
in the village of Bohdanivka, Kyiv Region. She lived her first twenty four
years without ever leaving Bohdanivka, and when finally one day she ventured
out she was completely overwhelmed by what she saw: locomotives, like metal
monsters vomiting billows of smoke and steam; huge buildings of the kind never
seen before, milling crowds in the streets; wondrous wagons rolling on the
roads all by themselves, with no horses or oxen pulling them - this strange and
somewhat frightening world outside the native village had made a lasting
impression upon the young woman. She lived a life of six decades but her trips
"to the big world" were few and far between, and were always regarded
as "important events."
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Dahlias, or Flowers and
Viburnum. 1940. |
She lived in her parents’ peasant house doing
all the chores a peasant woman was supposed to do, but whenever she had some
time to spare she devoted it to painting. She did not have any formal education
at all. She learnt to read and write when still very young all by herself, and
her parents decided she was literate enough and did not let her have any more
schooling. Kateryna taught herself to paint and mastered the technique of
painting without any help or advice from professional artists.
Gradually, her works became known in Kyiv.
They were duly appreciated. During her lifetime, they were shown at exhibitions
in Moscow and in Paris. Many of her paintings made their way to museums. She
was given all kinds of awards and titles, she was invited time and again to
come to live in Kyiv, she was offered a good studio to work in, but she
stubbornly declined all such offers and invitations, and continued to live in
her native village, in the house that her father had built. She took good care
of it, whitewashing the walls, decorating it, keeping it clean and in good
repair. After her death in 1961, the house was turned into a memorial museum.
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Breakfast. 1950. |
It is a small house. You have to watch your
head when you enter, because the lintel is low. The bigger room can accommodate
just a few people at a time, and the smaller one that was used by the painter,
as a studio is really tiny. Now it is hard for a foreign visitor to understand
how a house of such a size could be a home for so many people: Bilokur’s
parents, her brother and his wife with five children, and she herself, they all
lived there at one time or another sharing the limited space.
Bilokur refused to let anyone into her studio
- not only her relatives and neighbours who did not appreciate her strange,
senseless hobby, but also visitors from the capital, art critics and art
dealers who came to have a look at her works and purchase them. Probably, she
was a bit ashamed to show her sanctum to important guests, fearing their negative
reaction to the small size and lack of furniture in her studio.
Now you can see there an easel, little table,
small bench, bookshelf with books and a bunch of brushes in an earthen jug,
several dozens of them. They were made by Bilokur herself, finely crafted. When
she could afford to buy factory-made ones, she did not because she found them
too coarse and not suitable for her work.
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Flowers Beyond the Fence.
1935. |
Her studio is so small she could take only a
couple of steps back to look at her painting on the easel from some distance
away.
Though the artist herself thought she painted
"just flowers" which always grew in profusion around her house, there
is much more in her paintings than floral representations. There is something
enigmatic in them, a call to visit the unknown. Bilokur loved flowers, wild and
cultivated, she planted them in her backyard and never cut them — she said that
to cut a flower is to immediately kill it. She did not hesitate to portray
flowers of different seasons in one and the same painting, because she transformed
them into magic images that exist beyond time and space. For her, creation of
beauty was not regulated by the actuality of the here and now.
Her paintings are meticulously executed,
every little detail is very carefully painted, no two flowers look alike, but
through this figurativeness you can glean something that suggests the presence
of worlds, other than ours. As an artist said looking at Bilokur's paintings:
“She paints dreams about flowers, rather than flowers themselves.”
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Portrait of the Artist’s Nieces.
1939. |
Mostly, they are happy dreams. She eschewed
using black paints even for making underpainting. She tended to use what she
called lucid hues. Only several of her self-portraits she painted using only
black and white paints. For her the drudgery of everyday monotonous reality was
tragically black and stood in a stark contrast to the multicolored dreams of
her other paintings.