I was so much impressed by one picture by Lilia Pashynska (a friend of mine received it as a present) that I came up with a desire to meet the artist. The picture showed Jesus with two rays streaming from his heart. I have seen many images of Christ. But this one is a special one, it is living and loving. (Maybe we have so many religious conventions in our life that when meeting Living God, we stop in amazement.)
Pashynska’s apartment reminded me of a mini gallery. Besides, it is very stylish, not in terms of expensive design, but in terms of the taste and creative imagination: she gave a second breath to her old things, and experience to new ones by combining them with rarities.
It is clear from the exposition that the artist has two favorite styles, floristic and existential. She has mastered the first one long ago and the process of mastering the second one is underway.
“It coincided with my conversion,” Ms. Pashynska shared, “Now I can feel that the deeper I plunge in relations with God, the more desire I have to paint Mother of God, Christ, and the Saints. And painting them is remaining in a blissful state. Praying. You get detached from the world and the Biblical characters revive before your eyes (Cain and Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, prophets Jeremiah and Elijah), the plots from the Bible (Jews leaving Egypt, the Nativity, the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the Passion of the Christ, Resurrection). Many artists and sculptors turn to Biblical plots, each in his/her time. Those events are magnetic, concealing the answers to the eternal question about good and evil, life and death.”
“What about the flowers? Why do you have such a strong appeal to painting flowers?” I asked.
“Flowers are beauty. And beauty cannot but captivate,” was the reply.
(The artist planted a flowerbed near the entrance to her house. Everyone feast their eyes on them, but only she takes care of them.)
It is clear, why Pashynska focuses specifically on these two streams, existential and floristic, – they are interlinked. I mean that God is beauty and grandeur. This understanding dawned on me when I was standing on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.
And the flower series includes the swollen buds, which can hardly keep on the stems, the orange variety of tulips, lilies with a dizzying smell, refined irises, delicate snowdrops, ivy in blossom, and sun-shaped sunflowers. One can feel that while painting them the artist was playing with colors and tints. One color smoothly gives way to another one, with the tone close to the previous one. Sometimes it dissonances with another one, in such a way separating one flower from another and creating an original bouquet, which seems to have just come from the florist in one of the capital’s elite flower shops.
Incidentally, Pashynska’s teacher, Merited Artist of Ukraine Nina Bozhko is the first person so see and “approve” her pictures, before anyone else sees them. The artists frequently see each other, speak about art and life. Sometimes new ideas are born in their conversations. However, more often the idea is implied by life, to be more precise, by the world around us when, as Ms. Lilia says, you look at it with wide-open eyes.
This spring she bought an armful of tulips. She did not have a vase big enough for it. So she put it carelessly in a bucket. And this carelessness produced a special effect. The “free” tulips bent over the edge of the bucket or inclined to each other and created a really natural composition. It resembles women’s uneven hairstyles, which are fashionable these days.
On the whole, the artist likes to paint from nature, especially in summer when everything is in blossom. Nature is one of the main sources of inspiration for her.
“I never have an inner feeling that my picture is finished,” Ms. Pashynska said in the end. “Even when it is already part of my home exposition or I presented it to someone. I always think: what if I change it this way or that way? What I want to say is that creation of a picture is a sudden, captivating, and lengthy process.”
P.S. Lilia Pashynska’s exhibit opened on September 15 in her hometown, Korostyshev in Zhytomyr oblast.
