A folk artist who would do every nation proud

“Old people call it ‘the call.’ In my case it’s an image that stays on my mind wherever I go and whatever I do. I know I’ll have to transfer it to the canvas. I see it in my sleep; it seems to be struggling to convey a message, something about not abandoning it, begging to be rendered alive on the canvas. Other times I find myself painting imaginary things —funny, scary, or sometimes so striking and unusually attractive that I just keep looking. I hang such pictures all over the dark room. I look at them, I cry and laugh like a real loony, asking myself how I managed to create them. Now and then they caught me in this state of ecstasy,” wrote the prominent Ukrainian artist Kateryna Bilokur in her letters. December 7 marked the 109th anniversary of her birth.

Much has been written about Bilokur, but her paintings can tell far more about her. Tourists from Japan and China regard her canvases as proof that the artist was spiritually close to their cultures, pointing to her precise brushstrokes and rich palette. In 1957, Pablo Picasso saw her pictures during an international art exhibit in Paris and compared them to those made by the naive style French painter Seraphine Louis de Senlis. He is said to cry out, “If only we had an artist of this caliber, we’d make the world start talking about her!”

There are her letters and memories of her close and dear ones. For decades all this data was gathered, compiled, and published by Mykola Kaharlytsky (generally regarded as an unmatched expert on Bilokur’s creative legacy). There is a kind of triptych with these titles: “Kateryna Bilokur: I’ll Make an Artist,” “Kateryna Bilokur as Seen by Contemporary Artists,” and “She Began to Shine Through Letters as a Star.” This is document of people’s memory.

The residents of Bohdanivka, Bilokur’s native town, now part of Kyiv oblast, resolved to honor the artist’s devotion to her homeland by giving her the status of an honorary resident.

Below are excerpts from Bilokur’s correspondence, which The Day saw as the most vivid evidence of the artist’s moods at various stages. These letters appeared in print in 1995, 2000, and 2007. They have long since become rarities.

Tetiana Yablonska wrote: “Those letters spoke to me like as if they were written by a professional short story writer. Such a whirlwind of passions and sentiments! Such captivating images! Incredible! They match her best canvases in every way! Kateryna Bilokur was gifted by the Lord. And she was happy, despite all her dramatic, even tragic experiences, because she knew no happiness other than that of creativity!”

Mykola Kaharlytsky wrote by way of introduction: “Kateryna Bilokur was unique in her way of living, conveying her ideas and sentiments in her paintings and letters addressed to so many people, going through her daily routine, and viewing the people of Bohdanivka. She was an ordinary woman, but when viewed closer by a fellow artist or writer, she turned out to be an extraordinary, spectacular figure.

“The sculptor Ivan Honchar mentions her in his memoirs as one that could be easily picked from a motley crowd and remembered long afterward, because she was inherently aristocratic, even if she was wearing rags in lieu of decent clothes … She was an extraordinary lady. She was immortalized in a sculpture as … a villager, even if not exactly a traditional one, because no one had conceived another image of Bilokur, be it in painting, print, audio/video tape. Kateryna Bilokur who would write about conceiving her images, being ecstatic, spurred by a moment of creative insight, inspiration, being in an irrational world of her own. She was desperate, balancing on the verge of sanity, and would walk out into the field and talk to flowers, caressing them the way a mother caresses her baby. She looked at a handsome fellow from a neighboring village who had come to propose and, finding no strength in herself to give him the mitten, decided to take a desperate step. Instead of getting married and thus putting an end to painting forever, she travelled to the grave of Taras Shevchenko in Kaniv, where she poured out her soul… Portraying Kateryna Bilokur this way is the hardest of tasks. But for Bilokur the artist this task proved easy; she didn’t have to invent her own image or embellish it in any way; in her letters she knew no taboos in sharing her feelings, joys, and sorrows…”