Between Church and Emergency Room

The things that happen in Ukraine’s daily life are not very attractive and a far cry from the beautiful and everlasting. People are used to hearing about how ugly and useless their life is today. It has got so that every attempt to do something in culture and life looks out of the ordinary and those that do so must be courageous and truly dedicated. There is, however, an even higher level of counteraction, when one does not only serve beauty, but also teaches others to do so. When such teaching, in our world composed of a diversity of heavy roofs, big and small, that seem to cover everything, acquires the shape of an island, a territory where laws reign that are somewhat different than those in our own roofed reality. Actually, there is such a territory in Kyiv, and one does not have to go far to find it. It is on the sixth floor at the House of Artist, a true Art Studio. Are there not many other art studios? First, there are not. After many decades of the facade existence of the system of amateur art, Palaces of Young Pioneers with their study/hobby groups. Gone with conventionalism is all that with which conventionalism existed: a possibility of refined creative leisure for whomever wished to indulge. Second, those few art studios still in existence are trying primarily to survive. Even regardless of the cost of tuition, the inner sense is also very much subordinated to commonness; people are taught things they will need in order to earn a living: design, clothing style, modeling, ceramics, and various crafts. The studio at the Central House of the Artist in this sense is in a losing business, teaching pure classical art, basic drawing techniques, composition — in short, all that which was our primary education has been unanimously discarded. Studio director Mykola Horokh still does not fully understand what prompted him to head such a thankless business, as his original relatively well-off solitary studio work, suddenly replaced by a very restless lifestyle. Indeed, there are so many things to worry about. As he puts it, “We have something best described as being between church and an emergency ward.” Here not only mothers bring their children. All age groups are represented, from 4-5 to 60 years, school and college/university students, sometimes even diplomats, all sitting docilely by their easels, among them a French and Spanish consul. The children feel completely at home and start painting things the most daring modernists can only dream about. Adults (with them one must use kid’s gloves and watch out, sighs Mr. Horokh) discover they can finally do something they have dreamed all their life. They can paint. The amateur is only part of the project, as every tenth studio member prepares for enrollment in a special art school and the Academy. Of these ten every eighth makes it. The secret is simple: good teaching staff. Here one is taught the ABCs of art and then what allows one to fearlessly take up any modern trend. Mr. Horokh says, “First, one must learn to read and then one will read all kinds of books” (he knows what he is talking about, being in charge of a teenage class, one of the most difficult at the studio). Although there are some 150 names on the waiting list, the monthly tuition fee has been the same for quite some time: slightly more than 40 hryvnias [about $7.20]. Another principled stand. Much could be said about the studio, about how some of its young people enchanted surgeons from the Amosov Cardiology Clinic, about the director’s various plans and projects, about paintings made by the children, and about the problems facing this small island of art built with such painstaking effort. However, the old truth that seeing is believing applies here particularly well. Simply drop by, look at the drawings and paintings; then at the authors, young and old, equally in love with the art; and maybe you too will join them.

№1 January 18 2000 «The Day»
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