Hanna Kolomyiets’ graphics
Hanna Kolomyiets’ story is a dream come true. She has always wanted to work and paint in Italy.
There is nothing new or original about her dream. Artists have always been strongly attracted to Italy as the cradle of the fine arts. Recently, the attraction has been amplified by a simple desire to leave Ukraine, settle in any European country, and pursue the American dream. For Hanna settling and making a living came last. First she just wanted to visit Kiefer Island without hoping to stay. The visits became frequent, but always followed by regular returns to Kyiv, to the apartment of her childhood with an antique stove and the view of Bessarabka market across the street.
The story begins in 1996 when a new artistic group appeared in Kyiv. It consisted of three young women artists and was called La Primavera (Spring). The allusion to Botticelli’s renowned canvas was made complete at the first exhibition, when they included part of his painting, the Dance of Three Graces , in their brochures. The women artists were Svitlana Zhelezniak, Natalia Petrenko, and Hanna Kolomyiets, who was the true star.
By that time Hanna had graduated from the Ukrainian Academy of Art (book graphics studio of Prof. H.I. Halynska) and was doing postgraduate studies under Prof. H.V. Yakutovych, one of Ukraine’s celebrated graphic artists of the 20th century. As a postgraduate, she did a most interesting triptych based on Dante’s Divine Comedy . In 1995 she became a member of the Union of Ukraine’s Artists and an active participant in art shows.
La Primavera proved short- lived and vanished after staging two exhibits. The first included Hanna Kolomyiets’s graphic series inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and the second one (held at the Russian Art Museum) showed off her illustration for The Tale of the Golden Feather .
Hanna Kolomyiets’s Decameron was a result of sheer coincidence, although a fortunate occurrence, that is best explained by the artist’s emotional state at the time. She filled her work with life-asserting joy and bright harmony. Hannah planned it carefully, but first it appeared not as a book, but as a collection of illustrations for her favorite twelve tales.
The narrators and characters of the tales seem to exist in the same space divided by exquisite arches with endless garlands, painted in tender “dusty” colors: yellow-brown, gray-blue, pink- violet. The creative path chosen by the artist implies stylization from the outset, yet Hanna Kolomyiets skillfully makes her analogies very subtle. Her Decameron illustrations are reminiscent of the Quatrocento style, but by no means indicative of an attempt to borrow from any of those masterpieces. Moreover, her works are absolutely modern in terms of form and language.
Hanna Kolomyiets remembered the action and tried to express the beauty of the culminating moment, since the plots of Boccacio’s tales are always very dynamic. Each of her monotypes is not a scene but a fresco miraculously surviving on the wall of a tumbledown antique palace — not even in Florence but in one of those miniature Italian towns that has not seen any travelers since the times of Pavel Muratov. In this fresco, “three young Gentlemen” and “seven Ladies ... all ... being of Noble descent, in faire form, adorned with exquisite behavior, and gracious modesty” find refuge from the plague in a secluded garden. They take turns telling stories about the crook Masetto di Lamporechio who, pretending to be mute, was hired as a gardener by a convent; the Saracen princess Alatiel whose blinding beauty caused eight murders; the young Catharina sleeping on the balcony, listening to the nightingales, and one night catching a “bird” of the most unusual species; and Juliet, an embodiment of intellect and will, brilliantly complying with the incredible requirements of her husband, the arrogant Count Bertrand Roussilion.
The series of illustrations for the Italian “Tale of the Golden Feather” appeared a year after the Decameron . For the artist, it was not only a step forward, but also to the side. Strangely, her new works were simultaneously akin to Quatrocento frescoes (as in the case with the Decameron monotypes) and Gothic book miniatures: exquisitely ornamented, markedly elegant, and aristocratic. At that time Hanna Kolomyiets was making a book and illustrating a fairy tale, with fairies, princes, and princesses.
The tale is about a naughty princess who carelessly offends a powerful sorceress and being ruthlessly punished, turned into a weightless feather. The feather is at once blown out the window and embarks on a winding road of adventure... Hanna Kolomyets tells the story in seven illustrations. Unlike the autonomous, self-sufficient Decameron monotypes, the Golden Feather is a complete cycle, with the entanglement, culmination, and denouement, but also with a rhythm of its own, first slow and smooth, even drawn-out, then gaining dramatic momentum, throbbing with the most dramatic scene of freeing the heroine from the enchanted castle.
Servants gleefully watch the crafty princess stealthily adding salt and pepper to the woman beggar’s soup (who would have imagined what would happen afterward!); the sorceress aiming her staff at the girl, who seems confused rather than frightened, uttering the curse; the king and queen with their retinue trying to entertain the princess, now a golden feather floating at the ceiling, blowing at her... All this is portrayed by Hanna Kolomyiets in every refined detail and with a sly touch, and the same is true of the solemn wedding ceremony, the traditional happy end of the tale. Perhaps the most striking illustration is the one in which the Golden Feather is soaring over a vast, strange yet comfortably familiar world, with people far below looking so small, gaping at her, seeing just a shining feather, the princess looking at them with a tired resignation, seeing no end to her weird journey.
In fact, Hanna Kolomyiets was also to experience a strange trip — but not as strange as the one taken by the princess. Her “Italian period” of creativeness dates from 1998. In Italy, she has been into monumental art, book graphics, and restoration. In 2000, she joined the Artists’ Union of Florence and took part in contests, winning the third international Progetto Pavees Murales. Her works were displayed as part of numerous group exhibits. She organized two personal exhibitions in Esta and Vicenza and did two graphic series as illustrations for Italian tales from the same collection as the Golden Feather , but which turned out quite different, offering an entirely new concept.
“The Scarecrow by the Drinking Well” is a burlesque about people living in two neighboring villages with just one drinking well. Boys start a fight that triggers off tempestuous events culminating in an attempt to keep the villages away from the well, now occupied by a monster. Hanna Kolomyiets makes this hustling and bustling (although at times moving) story a funny chronicle of sorts, with a monumental grandeur touch. People in both villages are fussy yet very much businesslike. First they are resolved to fight the monster, then they drag their villages away from the well. The scene is logically, even harmoniously complemented with narrow and steep mountains, looking indestructible and conveniently inhabited. They are best described as eternally undisturbed. Such mountain slopes over Italian valleys are small worlds set apart, with their own fortified walls, gates, and fragile belfries. They actually exist in that country (e.g., San Geminiano). And they are sure to be found in genuine Italian chronicles telling about events far more dramatic than that fight over a jumping loop and a scarecrow. Similar motives are also found in early Renaissance frescoes.
In contrast, her series of illustrations for the Italian tale “Cola Fish” have nothing to do with the Renaissance. It is a weird, frightening story about a mother inadvertently forcing a curse on her boy, turning him into something like a fish, and about his travels in the depth of the sea until his mysterious disappearance (death? escape?). This reflects the baroque style. And the technique is different. Rather than monotypes, rich in light and space, these illustrations are shimmering, almost fluorescent pastel on black paper. Cola Fish is partially covered in green scales, web- handed and footed. His mother and the boy king, who gives errands to the amphibious man, are characters showing an increasing complexity of portrayal. They seemed immersed in eternal darkness, night or maybe the fathomless depth of the sea upon the banks of which they live and to which all their adventures are linked.
Cola Fish is Hanna Kolomyiets’s latest illustrated Italian tale. Italian tales, however (considered apart from everything else), usually occupying 2-3 pages, are included in a voluminous collection to which the woman artist contributes on a regular basis.
Needless to say, there is a difference between Italy on a world map, where one can travel by bus, and the one that emerges from Hanna Kolomyiets’s graphics. A lot of things can be accepted and some put up with, after all has been said and done. However, only certain things can be loved, born of one’s creativeness. Sometimes it even seems as though the rest were accepted (and understood) just because of it. Maybe because of it.
