Pysankas rolled down to Manhattan!

This famed American egg painter has the Ukrainian origin; she is a master of ceramics art painting and member of the Union of Folk Art Masters of Ukraine. Sofia Zielyk was born in New York and obtained the higher education in art history in the New York University. Her art works have been exhibited in different countries. She runs master-classes for egg painting in the Ukrainian Museum of New York, Ukrainian Cultural Center in Hunter (the state of New York), the Ukrainian Institute of America and other places. Zielyk is the author of the book Pyshe Pysanky Babunia, Pyshe Mama, Pyshu Ya [My Granny Paints Eggs, My Mom Does So and So Do I. – Ed.] published in Kyiv in 1992. She works in New York. The Ukrainian pysankas have rolled down to Manhattan, to the First Avenue where the house of the art master and art theorist Sofia ZIELYK is.

“I pained my first pysanka with my mom when I was six,” Zielyk recalls. “My mom was reading me short fairy tales about the boy named Chap Chalap (written and illustrated by E. Kozak). In one of the stories Chap Chalap decorated his pysanka with stars, lines, and dots… I grew up painting eggs. I did not choose egg painting as my job – egg painting chose me.”

What are your favorite egg ornaments and motifs?

“I like a lot floral ornaments and the so-called endless ornaments. I also paint ceramics. I do not know what I like more: painting eggs or ceramics. For example, I like floral ornaments from Poltava on goose and ostrich eggs, Hutsul scenes, shepherds and musicians on goose eggs.”

Are the post-modern pictures appropriate for pysankas?

“I think if people combine ornaments and try to modernize them, future generations will forget how real pysankas looked like. In the US I have seen the Statue of Liberty, Mercedes cars and Merlin Monroe painted on eggs, very good works. Probably, it is the art too, but it is not egg painting! A pysanka is first of all a symbol based on the millennial tradition.”

How do your American friends take pysankas?

“I show the techniques of egg painting and run lectures about their symbols and history in various American museums, churches, schools, and organizations. People often come to me and thank me with tears in their eyes for reminding them about their great-grandmother, grandfather or great-grandfather who told or wrote them about pysankas in their childhood. They do not speak Ukrainian anymore, they have American surnames, but they still remember about their national heritage and are very proud of it. Today I have more orders from the Americans than from the Ukrainians. However, there is a category of people looking for their national origins. Once a man called Johnson came to me and told that he had found out that his grandmother had come from a village near Borshchev (the Ternopil oblast) and he wanted to have a pysanka from that region. That village does not exist anymore but his genetic memory has remained.”

You are the first American art master whose pysankas were exhibited in Ukraine. Back then you came to Ukraine for the first time. Do you remember your impressions?

“It was in 1992. My exhibit was held in Kaniv, in the Shevchenko Museum. The opening was attended by Lidia Krushelnytska theatre group who came on a tour from New York and 200 guests from all over Ukraine. It was strange that only few people had heard about pysankas and most of them saw them for the first time. Personally for me it was something more important than an exhibit of the American author. My parents brought the tradition of egg painting to the US, preserved and developed it and I had the honor and mission to participate in bringing it back to my homeland where it originates from. I am happy that egg painting has been developing and prospering over the past 20 years.

“There is a legend in the Carpathians. People used to believe that they had to paint eggs so that the world continued since far in the mountains there was a terrible snake chained upon a rock. Every year it sent its ‘agents’ to check if people were painting eggs. If people were painting eggs, they came back and chained the snake yet more. If people were not painting, the snake started unchaining. Those chains would fall down and the snake would break free and destroy the world. And all people would die. That is why I always ask God that people do not stop painting eggs.”