Freedom is the primary and inseparable part of any artist’s creative activity. For Inna Panteleimonova, whose solo exhibit “120 Months” has opened at the Kyiv House of Writers, freedom is the key-word. Freedom emanates from Panteleimonova’s pictures like Bulgakov’s Margarita with her triumphant, “I am free!”
But it is not a passionate, aggressive, and unfettered whirlwind that blows everything away. The artist’s works exude a feeling of calm, contemplative, and peaceful freedom. Panteleimonova’s art is the creative work of a person that has recognized freedom, possesses inner freedom, and who is able to analyze it and offer her personal artistic assessment.
Panteleimonova is a rather young professional artist. A former resident of Odesa, she joined the youth organization of the Odesa branch of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1998. In 2002 she was an intern at the National Academy of Pictorial Art and Architecture in Kyiv, where she acquired the title of “painter-artist.”
Panteleimonova’s works are in many private collections in Ukraine and abroad: Germany, Mexico, the US, Australia, England, and Canada. The artist proved herself at several prestigious plein-airs in Croatia, the Crimea, and the Carpathians, and her works have been exhibited at four solo shows in Odesa and Kyiv: The Scent of Spring, Cherished Lands, Gatherings on Banks, and Between Heaven and Earth.
Panteleimonova’s latest exhibit is a new stage in her creativity, marked by a quest for a new era of new paintings. Her characteristic color palette is light- ochre, yellow, and warm straw-colored tones, touched with undertones of red, blue, violet, green, and maroon. Her palette is supplemented by various light ornamental hints that give a certain national coloring to her pictures.
But the Ukrainian character is not a determining and forceful accent; rather it is the light and tactful presence of emotions. There is a romantic fantasy touched with kind irony in the picture In the Whirlpool. Little white nanny-goats try to rise aloft into the usual route followed by birds. They are grazing on a yellow field of discolored grass, cheering each other up with their multicolored horns. They look like toy characters, and in the sky a Cossack and a girl are riding a big nanny-goat, snuggling close to each other.
There are nanny-goats in the picture A Cuckoo Flew, as well as other domestic creatures — cows, dogs, and oxen. They are depicted in a stylized, naive manner. The childlike drawing shows a herd of cattle plodding through the village, past a big house with a thatched roof. The scenery is dotted with other houses scattered in the distance, but the principle of perspective is violated here: the idyll of a man, the unity of all living creatures with nature.
One can feel Maksymylian Voloshyn’s influence in the picture Karadah. The colors are the same, and there is a similar view of the severe beauty of the mountains. Panteleimonova expresses her admiration for the tranquility of the eternal summits.
Temptation by Freedom is the artistic depiction of this feeling. Fantastic cities are produced by Panteleimonova’s paintbrush, which may be seen only in the imagination or in sweet dreams. Here the artist’s favorite color palette is sandy-green. Everything seems to be wonderful in the cities, but the captive princess strives to become free. She heads for the sky, like a rainbow, toward the figure of a man, barely seen, in pursuit of the “bluebird of happiness.”
An ancient building depicted in the picture Shadow of the Griffin resembles something Crimean-Tatar. There are cypresses everywhere, and the blue ribbon of the sea beckons on the horizon. Suddenly there is a herald from the past — the shadow of a griffin on a light-colored wall. The painter seems to catch the moment when parallel worlds intersect, when the past clearly shows through the present. The silhouette of a real griffin is also present in the picture.
How can one express the joy of life, the excitement from perceiving the beauty of the world? Panteleimonova does it in a simple way, as in the painting Joy, where she shows the tumult of verdant fall crops, and the radiance of the golden autumn. The grandness of nature, which arises mightily behind the small figure of a man, is contrasted with the person’s courage in the face of this inequality. He spreads his arms: in this gesture are buoyancy and an eagerness to fly.
The painting Angel’s Day is compositionally divided into two parts. Above is the sky, and below are the earth and water with the reflection of three cypresses (the main characters in this story). Each of them has it own riddle, its own dark world hidden underneath the branches. A white angel has lost his way among these three cypresses. He may be hiding and getting ready to help, or maybe he is getting ready to fly away after a completed mission.
One of the most impressive paintings at the exhibit is The Master of Temptation, above all because it is the most informative one. In the composition the central figure of a girl is supplemented by two trees with stylized tops, which stand on both sides of her. In the trees magpies seem to warn about the approach of the village beauty. One truly should be afraid of her because she is walking so independently along the path, dressed in her festive plakhta (a kind of Ukrainian skirt.) There is much irony in her figure: from a stick that she carries on her shoulder hangs an unreal little sack through which peer the contours of men’s faces — the victims of the coquette. She is carrying the main catch under her arm — a big red fish with a head of a humble, mustachioed Cossack, who has already reconciled himself to having swallowed the beauty’s bait.
Feelings conduct their penetrating conversations in the paintings Tree, Pasque-Flower, Home, Baiun the Cat, and Brimming with Love. There is no place for brilliantly expressed philosophical subtexts in Panteleimonova’s paintings. Her works are pierced through with a feeling of conscious admiration for the world. She wants to settle all her spectators in The City of Sun, where the cluster of little houses only please the eye with the proximity of friends’ houses, where one can enjoy the cool breeze and protection from the southern heat, where one can easily run down the stairs to the water glittering with speckles, and afterwards go on a boat trip. And in this warm, soft, cozy, peaceful, and idyllic world that Inna Panteleimonova has painted with love everyone will be happy — always.
