On Maundy Thursday the central exhibition hall of the Ukrainian Artists Union saw the opening of a new exhibit featuring Oleh, Serhiy, and Oleksandr Zhyvotkov, all three excellent artists whose creative attainments are in many respects different in terms of formal standards, yet surprisingly close by essence, perhaps due to their professional, cultured stand, and enviable intellectual level.
The Zhyvotkov family creative alliance lost its trilateral character a year ago after Serhiy Zhyvotkov passed away. One is reminded of Russia’s Andrei Makarevich singing about musicians departing this world, which is a bad sign. Yet musicians, poets, and artists leave behind their creative legacy.
Today the Zhyvotkov family tree depends primarily on Oleh. To understand what caused the Zhyvotkov artistic orientation, one has to trace their family history. The more so that, while previously everybody was supposed to look to the shining communist future, Oleh Zhyvotkov was collecting bits and pieces of the past.
We were at his studio and he was treating me to tea with winter cherry jam, telling me about the family, sharing his views on art and on how art could be taught to children (he has for number of years been teaching at the Taras Shevchenko School of Art).
In his own words, the family name, Zhyvotkov, can be found in birch scrolls dating from the Novgorod Principality. One of the Zhyvotkovs may have fled to the Pereyaslav land, siring this creative dynasty there. The artist’s father Oleksiy Lesyk came from Lviv after serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the civil war [1918-20], he worked as a grade school principal. In 1937 he was arrested by the NKVD and executed. Oleh’s mother Tetiana, wishing to protect the son, gave him her maiden name. She was a graduate of Odesa’s college of art, having practiced at Kostandi’s Studio, yet now she taught Russian literature at school. She instilled in Oleh a love for poetry (later, Federico Garcia Lorca, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Blok would become his favorite poets, whose poetic rhythm he would work into his pictures).
Oleh Zhyvotkov reserved especially warm words recollecting his uncle on his mother’s side who studied under Cuingi at St. Petersburg’s Art Academy, his tactfulness and genuine aristocratic bearing, his thrilling stories about St. Petersburg and Moscow painters. His mother was a Georgian princess and his father a general of the Russian Guards, under Nicholas II, considered the military elite who would later fight the Bolsheviks as the White Guard.
One of the shocking memories of his childhood was the sight of his grandfather’s burning home in the village of Berezan; it was set on fire by a retreating Wehrmacht soldier in 1943, leaving the family homeless, yet the greatest loss was the home library consumed by the blaze.
Next he remembered the gold medal he has received when graduating from the college of art [the Soviet version of the Western diploma cum laude] and his study at Grigoryev’s studio where the motto had been Touch Not He that Creates! His fellow students were Dubovyk, Lymarev, Barsky, and Zhuravel. He made a trip to Kizhi in Karelia where the grand cold expanses served as yet another very important teacher.
After triumphantly defending his diploma project, “Taras Shevchenko Visiting with His Sister,” he was offered a spectacular career by Soviet standards as manager of the Vorontsov Palace at Alupka in the Crimea, and the post required his membership in the Soviet Communist Party. Oleh Zhyvotkov declined both, to preserve what is currently dubbed as the ecology of one’s soul. He worked for the Veselka Publishers, painting fairy-tale beasts that were much kinder and more understanding than humans.
He spent many years working with children, winning their implicit trust and affection, the way only children can act, for he strove to see a younger colleague in every student, believing that the culture of teaching and being able to learn was more important than the teaching method.
Landscape is the main theme of Oleh’s work. He thinks that the age of genre painting is over and different kinds of art have come in its stead. Explaining his vision of landscape, he resorts to a geometric pattern with study, stylizing, and imagery as components, with the image occupying the dominant position. His landscape is an image of nature. “You can’t make a real work of art proceeding from just a study; you have to let the world penetrate your whole self,” says the painter. Personal impressions and working out the subject result in precise creative images. Oleh Zhyvotkov’s landscapes are not just portrayals of nature; he does not mean for the viewer to recognize or identify a certain locality, he wants to build images reflecting the small and big worlds created by intertwining colors and shades, accompanied by poetry and music.
Serhiy Zhyvotkov’s canvases exude peace and quiet, Venetian harmony and elegy. While it is true that Venice is slowly but surely sinking, the artist’s portrayal of the city of St. Mark is imperceptibly raising it to heavenly heights. Meditativeness is perhaps the key word for his work
Oleksandr Zhyvotkov specializes in abstract painting. His images are born of light amplified by colors. Outwardly monochrome, his canvases are virtually deceptive, dominated by a monolithic large-scale approach, transforming character representation as a self-sufficient substance, something not everyone can see with the naked eye.
