An earthen mixing bowl as a philosophical generalization
Ten years have passed since Leonid Bohynsky first exhibited his works at the Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art.
During our meeting this time the potter admitted that he had postponed this new exhibit for three years. His exhibit features his best works created during various periods. Bohynsky’s creations are on display in Kyiv and art museums in Khmelnytsky and Sumy. His works are in private collections in Ukraine and abroad. I talked with Leonid Bohynsky about modern art, pottery, and problems that concern him today.
The art world exists in a whirlwind of postmodern chaos. Do you think such trends are having an impact on the potter’s art?
L.B.: It’s hard to give a definite answer to this question. Today, Japanese and Italian master ceramists are the best. They hold various exhibits that follow two trends: traditional ceramic pieces with modern hues and innovations probably driven by European thought (Cubism, the collapse of form, then cohesion, and so on). Incidentally, these artists refer to themselves not as ceramists but as plasticists. Every artist looks for his own kind of “language.” I believe that this language has three roots; first, it is important to determine what you are going to create, how, and for what purpose. This is the ceramic artist’s language and style. The more one artist can make himself different from the next, the greater his popularity. Look at the creations of renowned artists of all times and nations, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. You can identify them instantly. Their works exude tremendous energy. Van Gogh, for example, had a special thirst for life and this is obvious in his pictures. That is when an artist’s language and signature emerge — even his last painting, Crows Over Cornfields, is very dramatic and charged with so much energy.
When did you first decide to use clay? Was it before you began studying at the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Art?
L.B.: Heorhii Nierekhov, a gifted painter, was one of my first teachers. You know, I wanted to be a painter. Every time I go to the Crimea on holiday, I have a box of watercolors with me. When I was studying in college, I always got top marks in drawing and painting. Even after I graduated from the institute, I planned to take up painting. But then ceramics captured my heart. I came to Lviv to master this folk craft.
I am very fond of the Ukrainian form and visualize it as a makitra, an earthenware mixing bowl. A monumental makitra is a great philosophical generalization; it is an image of the sufferings of the Ukrainian land, it is the heart of our homeland, and the ark that safeguards the strength and soul of our people. No one wanted to work in the countryside, but I chose Opishnia, the largest eastern Ukrainian pottery center. It has its own special style and sense of form. I was actually more interested in form than in the way they paint their works. At the time we had such renowned masters as Bilyk, Seliuchenko, and others.
