Halyna Zubchenko

Halyna Olexandrivna Zubchenko ( uk, Галина Олександрівна Зубченко; 19 July 1929 – 4 August 2000) was a Ukrainian painter, muralist, social activist and member of the Club of Creative Youth. She joined the Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1965.Poshivaylo, (1999), p. 15

Early life

Halyna Zubchenko was born in Kyiv in 1929 into a family of scholars. Her father, Alexander Avksentevich Zubchenko, studied agricultural sciences and her mother, Hanna Skrypchynska, was a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Career beginnings

Zubchenko's first art teacher was Okhrim Kravchenko, a painter of the Boychukist school. She continued her studies at the Palace of Children's Creativity under Elizabeth Piskorska, a student of Fedir Krichevsky and Mykhailo Boychuk.

From 1944 to 1949, Zubchenko attended the Republican Art School, where she took painting and drawing lessons from Vladimir Bondarenko, another disciple of Fedir Krichevsky. After secondary school, she studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute under Oleksii Shovkunenko. She graduated in 1959.

In the summer of 1956, Zubchenko went to Lemkivshchyna, a region in the lowest part of the Carpathian Mountains, to practise '' en plein air'' painting.Poshivaylo (1999), p. 16 She became keenly interested in the customs of the local Hutsul community; drawing inspiration from their everyday life, she set to make studies and sketches that would become the base for her painting ''Arkan'', completed later that year. Many years later, the painter said, "The Carpathians are my inner world, my dream that has come true. Since my childhood, I've been living in two different epochs: in the ancient times of Kievan Rus and the present. I've been always so much attracted to the ancient past but I could not find what I was looking for in Kyiv. But there, in the mountains, I've discovered the spirit of ancient times ... of ancient Kyiv ... I've seen it in the way people live, in the clothes they wear, in their customs, in the way they speak."

In 1957, Zubchenko returned to the Carpathians, this time to Richka, a village near the River Kosovo, where she lived with a Hutsul family. There she painted various portraits and landscapes, including ''A Girl from the Village of Richka'', ''Willows'', ''Without a Musician There Would Not Be a Fest,'' and ''Where the Mountain Bears Live''. The following summer, she went to the village of Brustory to continue with her series of portraits. She painted ''Girls from the Village of Brustory'' (now part of a private collection in Philadelphia, United States), ''A Girl among Flowers'', ''Semen Paliy'', ''A Churchwarden'', ''A Little Princess'' (now part of a private collection in Australia), ''Silver Evening'', ''A Neighbour's House'' and many landscapes.

Graduation

Zubchenko decided to paint a traditional Hutsul wedding for her degree. ''Hutsul Wedding'', large oil on canvas, depicts a wedding procession coming down a hill; it is one of her central works, in which she reflected the experience of traveling around the Carpathians for three years.Poshivaylo, (1999), p. 18

The Kyiv State Art Institute staff found the painting overly nationalistic and compelled Zubchenko to modify it. Even though Oleksii Shovkunenko, the supervisor of her project, strove to avoid this, she had to change the background and the appearance of the main figures.

Carpathian paintings

Between 1959 and 1964, Zubchenko made several visits to the Carpathian Mountains and produced another series of paintings of the Ukrainian countryside and Hutsul people. Some of the works from this period are ''Moysyuchka'', ''Princess Paraska'', ''An Old Fortune Teller'', ''Mistress of the Mountains'', various portraits of men (''Owner'', ''Hutsul Nicholas'', ''Legin'') and children (''Vasyuta'', ''Vasyuta and his brother'', ''Chichko'') and the landscapes ''Above the Cheremosh'', ''Clouds Walk above Verkhovyna'' and ''Dreamy Evening''.

Monumental art

In 1962, Zubchenko joined the Club of Creative Youth (Клуб творчої молоді), a multidisciplinary group founded by Les Tanyuk