Light joy of Marfa Tymchenko’s art

Marfa Tymchenko in her decorative paintings and works of porcelain developed unique ornamental style created not by one generation of craftsmen native to her old village of Petrykivka in Dnipropetrovsk region, which echoes the style of Ukrainian Baroque. Tymcheko, who lived and worked in Kyiv long time ago, was one of the true titans of Petrykivka School of Decorative Painting.

Centers of folk art in Ukraine always impress with their continuous artistic literacy, where the secrets of craftsmanship were passed down from generation to generation, from hand to hand, and from heart to heart. Marfa got her first brush made of cat’s hair from her mother’s hands. But eventually she managed to use it not only for aniline paints and gouache. Until her last moment she worked with the same kind of a brush but for oil painting, which nobody has done before her.

Tymchenko was born in the village of Petrykivka in 1922. When Marfa was still a little girl she always had a pencil in her hand, she even managed to simultaneously draw and pasture a goat by tying it to her leg or waist.

There was a pear tree near their house and Marfa would climb to the top of it to see the flicker of, not yet seen by many of kids from Petrykivka, light bulbs which lit the city of Dniprodzerzhynsk – the fairy tale city in her childhood imagination. She begged her mother to take her to the city where her father went to work and mother would bring him food. How happy was the seven-year-old girl when mother agreed to take her and they went on foot along the sandy road (over a dozen miles there and back!) to the city of her dreams. Either because of the excitement or of being extremely tired Marfa’s first long distance trip resulted in her legs being paralyzed for a few weeks and there was a threat of remaining disabled for the rest of her life. But soon the girl felt better.

Tymchenko studied in village elementary school where her painting and drawing teacher local intellectual Oleksandr Statyva recognized an outstanding talent of the girl.

However, after the fourth grade Tymchenko had to stop going to school because her mother was paralyzed. Still being a small child Marfa had to work on the collective farm, but Statyva never forgot about his favorite student and often came to visit her.

Great talent overcame difficult life situations. In 1936 Marfa became the student at the Petrykivka School of Decorative Painting, where her teacher was Tetiana Pata, master of Ukrainian Folk Decorative, so called Petrykivka style, Painting, Honored Master of Folk Art of Ukraine, who established the constellation of Petrykivka painting greatest masters. She helped to reveal the talent of the future well known artist. In 1938 Marfa was sent to Kyiv for studying in the School of Folk Art, which later in 1940 was reorganized into Kyiv Art and Industrial School.

Tymchenko remembers what a shy and timid girl she was when she came to Kyiv, how amazed she was with crowds of people at the station and how ashamed she was of her green suit case made of plywood, of her Ukrainian (because all around her she heard Russian), and of her more than modest peasant dress. She also remembers that when she finally got to the Lavra, where the school was located, she was amazed with Dormition Cathedral and the chimes of Lavra bell tower. When she was enrolled to school she decided: “If I become an artist I will paint my childhood and my native Petrykivka for sure!”

The war interrupted her studies. In 1945 Marta lived in poverty with her family in Petrykivka and at that time she received a letter from the School with a proposal to continue her studies. She accepted and went to Kyiv.

Since 1954 for 23 years Tymchenko worked at the Kyiv Experimental Ceramic-Art Plant (former Kyiv Porcelain Factory) together with Vira and Halyna Pavlenko who also came from Petrykivka – they already worked at the plant for a while then. “I learned for a week or so and then began to paint vases and sets on my own, later I even took large state orders,” said Tymchenko. Porcelain vases decorated by the magical brush of the master turned into precious jewels, which were presented as a gift from Ukraine to the government leaders of the fraternal republics and other countries.

In parallel with work on porcelain Tymchenko also worked hard with easel painting. Work in the creative team of painters, who in 1972 worked in the House of Art of the Artists’ Union in Sedniv, had a great influence on the changes in her easel works. “When Ivan [Tymchenko’s husband. – Author] and I came to Sedniv, when we wandered around the village and saw the Snov River, Sedniv meadows, forests, and fields I couldn’t eat my breakfast, lunch, or dinner, I couldn’t even sleep. How rich is nature, how beautiful and full of joy it is! On the next day we went down to the river and got to the other bank on a boat. Ivan began painting and I sat on the grass and was looking around thinking what I should paint with my cat hair brush. I looked on the other side of Snov and saw a hill there – there was a church on that hill and by the hill there were beautiful trees and nice little huts of various colors: blue, ocher, and green. Swallows flew all around and willows bent over boats… I began painting that landscape but in my own way, not like other artists could do, I had flowers blooming all around.

“Once Vasyl Nahai (he was the director of the Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art back then) saw my landscapes (there were already a few by that time) and said to me: ‘Marfusha, you know, you painted in a very interesting way, you found something new. Keep on painting!’ Since that time I painted more and more landscapes. Series of Sedniv paintings appeared. When I left my job at the plant I had more time and I could paint whatever I wanted.”

When in the 1980s the artist began working only with easel painting and finally left work with porcelain significant changes in her figurative and plastic thinking gradually took place. There appeared some looseness, improvising extended, uniqueness of her landscape painting was further developed. Interpretation of nature, worshiped by Tymchenko like a pantheist, is somewhat naive and, at the same time, fabulously decorative. Her picturesque and plastic mythologemes of Ukraine as a luxurious and generous land are derived exactly from folk syncretic consciousness. Rural landscapes in works by Tymchenko are invariably seen as flourishing and fruitful.

In paintings made by Tymchenko everything looks familiar but at the same time we get to know a different world – mythical and tragical, where the artist unwittingly and yet boldly violates the visible boundaries of art and reality. The series of decorative paintings from the 1980s and the 1990s “My Childhood,” where Tymchenko kept her promise given in childhood to paint her native Petrykivka, feature patriarchal village of the 1920s with its traditional whitewashed walls of huts among blooming gardens and flower beds, with charming nature around. Tymchenko received the highest Ukrainian Award in sphere of art, Taras Shevchenko Prize, for this series, which can be seen as a kind of painting short stories about the past, purified and crystallized by the memory of the artist.

Marfa Tymchenko was a wonderful woman and a wonderful artist. She lived a difficult but doubtlessly a happy life without enemies or envious people, which practically never happens in the creative environment. We will remember her as a beautiful, kind, sunny person, who amazed us with her touching openheartedness and light joy, which was present in her works.