Coming in to land, a plane tilted its wings, and its windows offered a view of orange-brown and ocher squares, painted in broad strokes to make up a sprawling landscape painting by Hanna Hidora. In the glow of the evening sun, one saw one composition displacing other in planes of fields. Large-scale abstract paintings delineated land and turned it into inventive geometrical shapes. The perfection of these examples of land-art rivaled Piet Mondrian’s works. These full-scale “canvas of the land” seem to embody the formula of Hidora’s worldview and artistic model.
Her contact with the land is constant. Hidora’s creative career started at the ground level, as she molded earthenware. The next stage involved working in the landscape with the nature’s elements: stone, water, and fire. It was only later that the land’s magic found its expression in the artist’s painting compositions. As the curator and participant of the “Land Art” projects, held in collaboration with Valerii Shkarupa, Petro Bevza and others, Hidora usually works in the village of Mohrytsia, Sumy region. She has long become a poet and a kind of a “biographer” of the locality.
The artist admitted: “When it comes to Mohrytsia, I want to take people by the hand and lead them to the highest spot of the Mohrytsia hillfort, because one can see the Psel floodplain for dozens of kilometers from there, and the landscape fills the body with an avian spirit. Additionally, complexities of topography and steep slopes which are inaccessible for grazing have allowed this area to survive as a kind of nature reserve for various grasses. Lush greenery erupts in picturesque diversity every late June. Among this crazy interplay of colors, one can discern a white patch where the earth’s innards come to light in the shape of the unique Mohrytsia chalk rocks. The heart gently pains with joy then. A nearby cottage marks the location of my grandparents’ farmstead. As a little girl, the grandfather brought me, a city child, to accompany him as he mowed hay on the hills in high summer. I still do not understand why he needed to keep a little child around as he worked in that heated season. Perhaps, his only goal was to make me, years later, to wish to share this beauty with the wider world...”
THE VALLEY OF THE WINDS
The grandfather taught her to listen to “the voice of grass,” while the grandmother, who was the local churchwarden in the 1960s, a dangerous time for the church in the USSR, molded the girl’s mind to view the world through a lens of the Bible and parables. This powerful duality is the backbone and the actual foundation of each piece created by Hidora even now. Her paintings originate in organic fusion with the nature and the ability to paint “the soul of the landscape” rather than landscape moments. Hidora’s paintings, featuring colors that are close to each other and flow from one to another, show the land the way it is, pinkish-orange at sunrise or frighteningly purple-brown at night. In addition, she is poet and essayist who has mastered precise and vivid words. Celebrating her native land, the author wrote: “Mohrytsia is a frontier settlement on a line dividing hillforts of the Siver lands from the Great Steppe. New entities have kept the borderland in flux forever. Here, the passage of time through the millennia leaves traces in the layers of the earth. Geological and archeological profiles of the Mohrytsia hillfort reveal the surface as it was during different eras... My environment projects, including Earth Will Endure: A Collection of Layers (2003), Carrier and Paths (2008), were all born on the chalk cliffs of Mohrytsia...”
Hidora owes her art training to her teachers, especially Borys Danchenko, who taught at a Sumy art studio where she studied from 1978 through 1983, and faculty members of the art graphic department of Kursk Pedagogical Institute which she attended in 1981-85. At the same time, the land was her other teacher, and perhaps the primary one. The artist remarked: “Wandering between symbols of the environment that have emerged over time (and perhaps have always been with us), one listens intently to the sound of whiteness – the structural color of the chalk quarry, glowing in its surreal purity, and feels that the wind, which was always nearby, left shadows in its wake.”
“The sound of whiteness” is a term which composer Valentyn Sylvestrov uses to denote a particularly tense sound of pause. “The pause, or the white sound, should be understood not as the absence of music, but rather a heightened sounding of it, a kind of resonance.” Wassily Kandinsky formulated psychophysical effect of the white color back in his time: “White, which is often defined as ‘the non-color’ is supposedly a symbol of the world where all material properties and substances are gone... This world is so highly exalted above us that no sound from there can get to us. A great silence comes from these heights. Thus, the whiteness affects our psyche as the silence of a magnitude we perceive as absolute... The whiteness sounds like silence, which can be suddenly realized.”
Even during her experiments with ceramics, Hidora ardently studied the past of Sumy region and its archeological heritage. The first polychromatic compositions revived ancient archetypes with stylized modern forms. She was a co-organizer (along with Shkarupa) and member of the creative team ART’s in 1989-99. Hidora employed her knowledge of the history of material culture in the region when she served as organizer and head of the department of decorative and fine arts at the Art Museum of Sumy (1993). Starting in 2003, the artist has been transferring her knowledge to the younger generations as a teacher at Sumy Bortniansky School of Arts and Culture. She was also among the curators of the “Raku-Ceramics” international project in 1993-96 and has been the author of the idea and curator of the international symposium “Land-Art: Mohrytsia” since 1997. Hidora took careful steps on her path to easel painting, investing in creating canvas the full array of acquired knowledge, her love of prehistory and the cultural matrix of land with its inherent contemplative inclinations and a sense of moment as the image of eternity. She has long learned to live and love with a sense of fragility and necessary completion of all that is most dear to the artist.
Hidora leaves marks of her personal presence and determines the place of the individual “I am here” on canvas as well as stone and paper. Since the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, she has used her paintings as the “place of presence.” She paints what she has seen and loved from her childhood years on – rivers, roads, and the hills of Mohrytsia. These pieces are vast landscapes, portraying the eternal land in large-scale paintings. The panoramic panels, built mainly on horizontal rhythms, are internally corresponding to essences of her native landscape with its history and archeology. Hidora developed a plastic system of her own, echoing somewhat the plastic approach of canvas by a colleague, “a poet of the Ukrainian land” Anatolii Kryvolap. There is a difference here, though – the atmosphere of her paintings is always charged with aura of dramatic expectation and anxiety. It comes as no wonder that Hidora likes to paint the bordertime between day and night, dusk, sunset. On the point of form, her compositions offer a comparison of linear silhouette plans, looking like colored scenery in the “theater of the landscape.” Thick oil colors, reinforced with ground dry pigment, emphasize the rhythmic and color force field of the paintings which serve as a kind of parables about the land. Compositions are also equally embodying psychological self-portrait of Hidora, a complex set of her feelings on the eternal, fleeting, instant, sustainable, and variable.
Her meditative sketches look like concise philosophical miniatures on light and air, rain, wind, sunrise, and dusk, and on the secret artistic knowledge of the world that has been revealed only to Hidora.
