It is hard to find an artist who loves Ukraine so much in his paintings and scorns it so hard when he speaks about it.
Gazing intently at a large canvas in a shabby studio in the center of Kyiv, painter Ivan Marchuk forgets for a few minutes that there are two people waiting for him. After a few strokes, he wakes up and gives a half-smile through his thick, walrus mustache that few besides artists sport these days.
One of the most talented members of the Ukrainian underground movement in 1960s, he fought for the restoration of a national culture along with thousands of other poets, artists, musicians and historians.
Artist Ivan Marchuk invented his own style of painting, plyontarysm, which makes his works look like they’ve been weaved, not painted. (Joseph Sywenkyj)
“I was banned by the Soviets, you know,” he said, recalling the period when he refused to draw the scenes of happy pioneers and obedient villagers working the fields. Instead, he wanted to paint Ukrainian landscapes in his own technique he called “pliontarism” from a Ukrainian verb “plesty,” or to weave. That’s why his lakes, trees and thatched-roof houses look as if they were knitted, not painted.
Two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, he escaped abroad, moving from Australia to Canada and then to the U.S., where he spent 11 years in voluntary exile. He came back a decade ago to find out that Ukraine still doesn’t recognize him.
It’s a burial ground of talents. This country is ungrateful. If a Ukrainian becomes famous and achieves something, it happens abroad, after he leaves Ukraine.”
– Ivan Marchuk, painter.
“It’s a burial ground of talents,” said Marchuk, 74, in his studio looking at hundreds of his paintings stacked on the floor. “This country is ungrateful. If a Ukrainian becomes famous and achieves something, it happens abroad, after he leaves Ukraine.”
Honored by prestigious Taras Shevchenko award in Ukraine and accepted by the International Academy of Modern Art in Rome to its ranks, he still doesn’t have a museum in Kyiv.
A year ago Marchuk claimed that if Viktor Yanukovych becomes president, he wouldn’t stay in Ukraine. But his health is failing him and his paintings are near. “If someone could move me away with all my paintings, I would have gone wherever possible. Even dying on the road is worth it, if only I have all of my paintings with me,” he said.
Yet, despite these dramatic remarks, he admits that he could have never created his remarkable landscapes anywhere else but in Ukraine.
“I never painted them in Canada, Australia or USA. That’s not my land,” he said. “Despite living in the city, I have the soul of a peasant. I always knew that if I don’t find myself in painting, I’ll quit the brushes, pick up a shovel and a rake and go work with the soil.”
Born to a family of a weaver, Ivan Marchuk says his father’s work inspired the technique, the details of which he keeps in secret. (Joseph Sywenkyj)
Apart from landscapes, Marchuk also paints portraits and abstract pieces, having created up to 4,500 works to date, he says.
In Kyiv Marchuk leads a reclusive life spending days and sometimes nights working in his studio. He usually arrives to his studio at 7 a.m., never forgetting to buy a newspaper before painting. “After 9 a.m. the news goes out of date, and I can’t read it anymore,” he remarked.
The world switches off as work begins. “I can take a cup of coffee with some cognac as my doping. And then I start my drudgery: As I torture the canvas, it tortures me back.” He spends at least 10 hours a day working. Sometimes he lies awake at night, he said, pondering over new ideas.
Living alone appears difficult at his age.
“An artist can’t exist without a woman, without a female body,” he said, but then stumbled as he spent a lifetime without a partner.
An artist can’t exist without a woman, without a female body. A real woman should make you want to come home, not hide in the studio. She has to be a delight for the eyes of a painter and an aesthete.”
– Ivan Marchuk, painter.
“A real woman should make you want to come home, not hide in the studio. She has to be a delight for the eyes of a painter and an aesthete.” Marchuk was married once – his commitment didn’t last more than three months.
When he doesn’t paint, he attends art exhibitions and gallery openings but despises the way they are organized. “In America you come, grab a drink and stroll with it looking around and chatting. The atmosphere stimulates a dialogue. Ukrainians, on the other hand, like to lecture [during art presentations].”
In modern art, he doesn’t seem to be inspired by any up and coming talent. “They’re all junk artists,” he said, shrugging shoulders and using his trousers to wipe fingers from paint. He said that he talked with curators from PinchukArtCenter, but apparently didn’t want to cooperate because “that art center is a kindergarten. There is no smell of art there.”
Locked day and night in his cramped studio, he literally sits on his paintings unwilling to sell them. “I want Ukraine to acknowledge me, to understand what it has.”
After a pause, he seems to be giving up on this dream: “I’m a fool to have come back to this madhouse. I just need to live in another country.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Alexandra Romanovskaya can be reached at [email protected].
