This Lviv-based artist is a well-known and highly appreciated personality in Ukraine and in Europe, as well as on the American continent. In the person of Ivan Ostafiichuk we have a kind of a modern master – intellectualist and philosopher, who is able to express his life and creative position in an exquisite artistic form. The suggestive power and originality of the creative expression of this artist lies above all in his deep rooting in life, history, and culture of Ukrainian ethnos.
Ivan Ostafiichuk gets topics and inspiration for his creative work from the realities of his native land in Pokuttia Transcarpathia, where he was born in the village of Trostianets (1940) and spent his childhood and youth. This is the source of his thorough knowledge of life and folkways of his people; he cognized its soul, mentality, and higher world of its ideals, metaphysical beliefs, traditions, and customs with his heart. In spite of that we won’t find a bit of superficial ethnographic features in the works of Ostafiichuk. This is an intellectualist-artist, who embraces in his creative worldview the broad horizons of modern civilization processes and world artistic phenomena. He combines the ability to sharply feel and react to modern spiritual-worldview trends with deep understanding of the spirit of Ukrainian national culture. All this has left its imprint on the unique character of Ivan Ostafiichuk’s artistic self-expression.
There is one more important fact. As an artist, Ivan Ostafiichuk developed in a specific social-cultural atmosphere of the City of Lion during the short Khrushchev’s Thaw in the 1960s. The artistic Lviv of that time with its unstoppable appeal to national sources and at the same time looking for new ones, which would be unanimous with the spirit of the time, formal-plastic decision, this Lviv with its expressively pro-Western creative guidelines fostered in the person of Ivan Ostafiichuk not only a nationally aware artist, but also a refined aesthete, armed with high culture of graphic and painting languages.
The artist has a rare gift of a colorist, demanding taste and philosophical composition, which enables him to see the world from the standpoint of timeless truths and values of human heart.
These and other contemplations come to mind when you observe the new publication dedicated to Ostafiichuk’s creative work (Marian Besaha’s Ivan Ostafiichuk. Sources of Creative Work. Album-Monograph, Kyiv Publishing House “Maister-Print”). The design of this book, created by Mykhailo Tsaryk with a great artistic tact and love is what above all draws attention to this book. The book has 287 pages, which were printed on thick chalk paper and is a distinctively structure integrity divided into several chapters. The book starts with the analysis of Ostafiichuk’s works authored by Ph.D. in Art History Marian Besaha, an assistant professor at the department of painting and management of the Lviv National Academy of Arts. Further, after a short review of the main publications about the artist, there is actually the album part of the book, which consists of a huge part “Graphics” (over 150 black-and-white and colored replicas) and the part “Painting,” including over 80 color reproductions. The book finishes with an interesting chapter of archival materials, which are a valuable material for the creative biography of the artist. Those are 50 photos, diploma awards, page spreads, and posters of home and foreign exhibits of Ostafiichuk’s works. Among them a special emphasis was made on the two high awards of the artist: the gold medal of the Ninth International Exhibit of Graphic Works in Brno in 1980 and Taras Shevchenko National Prize in 2007.
The luxurious reproductions of the works in the album part of the book are a sufficient representation of the major stages and milestones of the creative exploration of the artist, starting with his first, monumental in their laconic stylized language linocuts of the 1960s (Lasso, 1965; Music, 1968; a series of linocuts dedicated to Vasyl Stefanyk’s short stories, 1969) to graphic works of the 1970s, executed in a variety of techniques: colored lithography (Dance of Life, 1971; Arrival of Giants, 1971), etching (series dedicated to the legend of Dovbush, 1973), mezzotints (series “Dilemma,” 1975), ink drawings (series “Summer Impressions”), and after all the series of enchanting color engravings based on the motifs of Ukrainian folk songs, executed in the author’s combined technique (Oh, behind the grove, behind the grove, 1978; Oh, silver moon, rise, 1978, etc.). For these works the artist received the gold medal at the exhibition of graphic works in Brno in 1980.
Ostafiichuk’s graphic style changed abruptly in the 1980s, getting closer to the character of his painting style of that time. The works are executed with the help of brush and ink, or in the technique of colored linocuts, acquire expressive features of mature expressionism of the artist. Full of dramatic tension and understatement, they seem to urge the viewer to an active creative dialog. Those include pastels I think (1983), Autumn in the Carpathians (1985), a series of colored and black-and-white linocuts dedicated to Lina Kostenko’s poems (The Soul of Centuries is Looking for Itself in the Word, 1986), Taras Shevchenko’s words (Recall, My Brethren, 1987; A Ravine Comes After Ravine, 1987), and the compositions based on the motifs of Hutsul demonology (Molfar, Lisni-Lisnytsi, 2010).
In the 1980s the painting temper of Ivan Ostafiichuk burst out. His picturesque paintings impress with their expressiveness, many times with ecstatic tension of feelings, expressed with the help of an entire symphony of colors. The artist bravely and artistically operates with rich and bright colors – black, red, yellow, green, and reaches in this a rare color preciousness of his painting images – stylistically expressive and always enriched with deep philosophic reflections of the artist (Self-Portrait, 1984; diptych Icarus, 2000).
I want to note that every encounter with the artist’s works (even if those are only reproductions) is always an intriguing adventure, which gives the viewer the pleasure and at the same time urges to contemplate, touches the thinnest strings of human soul.
