Three steps to spring

Three young artists — Ihor Pankratov, Liudmyla Hlushenkova, and Tetiana Kovalenko — have opened a joint exhibit, “Three Steps to Spring” to present their landscapes and still lifes. What is common to them all is that they are alumni of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts.

Pankratov debuted in Nova Vodolaza, a picturesque village in Kharkiv oblast, where 35 years ago two enthusiastic artists helped open a children’s educational institution, which later became an arts school with subjects like painting, sculpture, dancing, and music.

Now Pankratov has exhibited his works created since 2001. The far-flung geography of his landscapes underlines the power of perception, the conveyance of mood, and the magic of a place that struck him, be it the width and depth of the Urals or the Carpathians, the attractive palette of the Crimea, the majesty of old Kyiv, or the intimacy of secluded backyards. The artist, who excels at and still experiments in all kinds of oil paining technique — from a thick and wide stroke to almost watercolor-style semi-transparency — says about himself: “I am selectively looking for images of everyday life, flirting with the muse of happiness”. Pankratov subtly feels the light that runs through not only landscapes but also still lifes, always suggestive and allegoric rather than obvious. On the exhibit opening night, Pankratov was performing his own musical and poetic compositions, with a guitar in hand, thus complementing the impression made by his pictures.

His works are displayed alongside those of his wife Liudmyla Hlushenkova, who began her artistic career at the Voronezh Art School. Her feminine hand clearly shows itself in a tender pastel of colors. Liudmyla’s painting conveys to the viewer the warmth that the artist felt and instilled in the picture’s plot suggested by a “vague universal image”.

Tetiana Kovalenko is the exhibit’s youngest participant — she turned 25 just on the eve of the opening. She learned the secrets of painting in her early childhood years, helping her father clean the pallet and mix paints and then transferring them to the canvas under his watchful eye. It is the father who became her first teacher and discovered an intuitive feeling for color and space in his daughter. Kovalenko has never pictured herself in a different walk of life. She hesitated only once, when she was applying to the arts academy: initially, she wanted to go to the designing department but deep resentment about excessive rationalism made her change her mind. She is now polishing her talent in masterly subject-and-genre painting.

Kovalenko’s landscapes and portraits are subject-and-genre pieces that express her deeply personal attitude to what she depicts. For example, the portrait of a relaxing girl poser: long tired legs stretched out toward the spectator, a scantily-clad body, a heavy head that nods in a moment’s nap, an opened book that dropped under a slackened hand, etc. There is so much sunshine in her works. It shines through the clouds, beams off the walls of little cozy houses and church domes, scatters sparks on smooth water, lights up flowers, and dries the laundered linen.