Master of Rare Technique

The exhibition features about a dozen works made in gesso on canvas technique. Most of them have been created in the past year. The author of the paintings, whose works can be found in museums and private collections in Ukraine and the world, told The Day that the gesso technique is very old. It existed back in ancient Egypt and Greece, and came to Ukraine with Byzantine icons. The grounding base is glue and chalk. “I modified it slightly. I use canvas and gesso, but in my case it’s acrylic. The acrylic gesso is more pliable and lets me work on canvas, shape images, and it absorbs color and paint better. Gesso is a complex technique. Works created using it are not made at once. It is a long process. On average, it takes nearly six months to make one painting and some take even more time,” said the artist.

“The series is called Ichthys, which means ‘fish’,” Shkarupa continues. “The image of fish is present in all the paintings. My zodiac sign is Pisces, that is why the topics of infinity, water, and movement are very close for me. My favorite painting is the last one – big golden Latymeria (Coelacanth). It always catches my eye and makes me wonder whether there is something I’ve missed. At some point you simply feel that you can add nothing else to it and it sets off into free floating. Its place is then taken by a new painting and the same process starts all over again.”

According to gallery director Tetiana Savchenko, Shkarupa has his own specific place in Ukrainian art space: “He is extremely skillful in working with gesso technique, I don’t know any other artist who would master it that well. Ukrainian artists like to work with gesso on wood very much, but here canvas is used instead. How does he manage to put all the layers of gesso material on a piece of cloth? One has to be a real pro and have thorough knowledge for that. Shkarupa, just like Leonardo da Vinci, uses flax paint. He adds gesso basis to the paint. I don’t know who among the artists could afford to do something like this because he is working with really old recipes. Shkarupa is very much fond of antiquities; he once worked a lot in sphere of archeology. He has his own secrets in creating paintings. It is not only exciting and technologically difficult, but it also provides great aesthetic impression as Shkarupa himself is an aesthete. He is a very modest man – you won’t read much about him in newspapers or see him on television. Before you ask what art collectors think of him, you should probably ask how the cultural community treats non-figurative art in general. It requires a society well-prepared intellectually and aesthetically. There is a much higher demand for figurative art, for what people can understand. Not everyone can understand this game of colored spots. Nevertheless, Shkarupa is a well-known artist.”

The exhibition of Shkarupa’s art works will last only a week – until September 6. Modest artist, who is also a technical director of the Triptych Gallery, donated a week for an exhibition of his American fellow artist Phil Turovsky. Shkarupa is currently preparing to begin work on a new series of gesso. Plein-air sessions and an exhibition at the Academy of Abstractionism in Sevastopol are scheduled for the nearest future.