Symbols cast by childhood

In her many-year creative work Liudmyla Bruievych has developed an author’s technique based on etching covered with watercolors. Today her works are well known in Ukraine and abroad, in Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and India. Her etchings are exhibited and published in colored calendars.

In each of her works the artist uses symbolical colors: red as symbol of life assertion, green as the color of wisdom and reasonability, ochre as solid earth, and sometimes golden as the color of light. She also makes calligraphic inscriptions around the core composition. According to Liudmyla Bruievych, her etchings were “cast over by childhood reminiscences about carpets hanging above the beds to adorn village houses.” On the whole, etching resembles traditional carpets, where the main character is depicted in a decorative manner, surrounded by a frame of plants or geometric ornaments.

However, the artist went further and created a whole world which combines eternity and monumentality with subtleness and decorativeness. Her cats live in a happy world where the sacral atmosphere does not by any means contradict the Epicurean joy of life. Looking at her Cats, we also get filled with this feeling of happiness, wisdom, and leisurely observation. Another etching shows a mystic woman, The Night, who holds a cat in her hands, and in the luxurious Meal, we see the biggest cats, lions, who peacefully sit below like good-natured guards of welfare.

The sphinx cats are immovable, with the look towards the eternity. They are a couple, with each one beautified by a crown, which is proof of tsar’s dignity. The artist says the cats are “focused on catching and keeping the fish of happiness and the fish of calmness.” These fishes can easily slip out of the cats’ paws and then their Eden bliss will be destroyed and the harmony they created will be lost forever.

The cats are monumental like sculptures which unite the past, the present, and the future. But a closer look at the details reveals that fishes are also male and female. The background of the etching is adorned with symmetrical couples of small fishes, and a couple of doves are in the center. In their beaks they have big bunch of grapes, which has been a symbol of wealth, prosperity, and joy of life since the ancient times, the time of Dionysius. “In the world of cats,” Bruievych says, “There is no unnecessary meanness, vain hopes, and empty words, only the feeling of happiness from simple things; and the ever-flourishing flowerpot called the tree of life asserts that love is beginning to everything.”

“A real creator is a kind of an antenna, which accepts the energy and reads the information from the air,” Bruievych considers, “He sees what remains unnoticed in the world of vanities, trying to keep and conserve this energy in his works.” The winner of the grand prix of the All-Ukrainian Triennale of Graphic Works, winner of Academy of Arts of Ukraine silver medal for creative achievements, Bruievych creates her own paradise world with pleasure and gives it to the viewers as a present.