Halyna Zubchenko


Halyna Olexandrivna Zubchenko was a Ukrainian painter, muralist, social activist and member of the Club of Creative Youth. She joined the Union of Artists of Ukraine in 1965.

Early life

Halyna Zubchenko was born in Kiev in 1929 into a family of scholars. Her father, Alexander Avksentevich Zubchenko, studied agricultural sciences and her mother, Ganna Skripchinskaya, was a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Career beginnings

Zubchenko's first art teacher was Okhrim Kravchenko, a painter of the Boychukist school. She continued her studies at the Palace of Children's Creativity under Elizabeth Piskorska, a student of Fedir Krichevsky and Mykhailo Boychuk.
From 1944 to 1949, Zubchenko attended the Republican Art School, where she took painting and drawing lessons from Vladimir Bondarenko, another disciple of Fedir Krichevsky. After secondary school, she studied at the Kiev State Art Institute under Oleksii Shovkunenko. She graduated in 1959.
In the summer of 1956, Zubchenko went to Lemkivshchyna, a region in the lowest part of the Carpathian Mountains, to practise en plein air painting. She became keenly interested in the customs of the local Hutsul community; drawing inspiration from their everyday life, she set to make studies and sketches that would become the base for her painting Arkan, completed later that year. Many years later, the painter said, "The Carpathians are my inner world, my dream that has come true. Since my childhood I've been living as in two different epochs: in the ancient times of Kievan Rus and in the present. I've been always so much attracted to the ancient past but I could not find what I was looking for in Kiev. But there, in the mountains, I've discovered the spirit of ancient times ... of ancient Kiev ... I've seen it in the way people live, in the clothes they wear, in their customs, in the way they speak."
In 1957, Zubchenko returned to the Carpathians, this time to Richka, a village near the River Kosovo, where she lived with a Hutsul family. There she painted various portraits and landscapes, including A Girl from the Village of Richka, Willows, Without a Musician There Would Not Be a Fest and Where the Mountain Bears Live. The following summer, she went to the village of Brustory to continue with her series of portraits. She painted Girls from the Village of Brustory, A Girl among Flowers, Semen Paliy, A Churchwarden, A Little Princess, Silver Evening, A Neighbour's House and many landscapes.

Graduation

Zubchenko decided to paint a traditional Hutsul wedding for her degree. Hutsul Wedding, a large oil on canvas, depicts a wedding procession coming down a hill; it is one of her central works, in which she reflected the experience of travelling around the Carpathians for three years.
The Kiev State Art Institute staff found the painting overly nationalistic and compelled Zubchenko to modify it. Even though Oleksii Shovkunenko, the supervisor of her project, strove to avoid this, she had to change the background and the appearance of the main figures.

Carpathian paintings

Between 1959 and 1964, Zubchenko made several visits to the Carpathian Mountains and produced another series of paintings of the Ukrainian countryside and Hutsul people. Some of the works from this period are Moysyuchka, Princess Paraska, An Old Fortune Teller, Mistress of the Mountains, various portraits of men and children and the landscapes Above the Cheremosh, Clouds Walk above Verkhovyna and Dreamy Evening.

Monumental art

In 1962, Zubchenko joined the Club of Creative Youth, a multidisciplinary group founded by Les Tanyuk in 1959 and dedicated to promote the Ukrainian culture. She and other artist friends – Alla Gorska, Nadiya Svitlychna, Victor Zaretsky, Halyna Sevruk and Lyudmila Semykina – created a division specialising in visual arts, directed by Veniamin Kushnir.
In 1964 Zubchenko, Gorska, Opanas Zalyvakha, Semykina and Sevruk made Shevchenko. Mother, a stained glass window for the lobby of the Red building of the Kiev National University. As the work was considered "ideologically hostile", the university's authorities ordered to destroy it.
In 1965, while working for the Academy of Architecture, Zubchenko was commissioned to decorate the exterior walls of the School No. 5 in Donetsk. Alla Horska helped her with the sketches for the eight mosaics, which measured between and each. While working on the sketches, Zubchenko and Gosrka consulted painter Gregory Sinica, who became director of the project. Other members of the Club of Creative Youth such as Zaretsky, Svitlychna, Gennady Marchenko and Vasil Parakhin collaborated with them. Participated in the creation of the following monumental and decorative panels: "Space", "Elements of water", "Fire", "Earth", "Miner's Edge", "Wind and Willow", "Sun", "Subsoil", "Animal World".
Zubchenko married painter Gregory Pryshedko in 1967. The couple worked together for ten years on the decoration of several public buildings in Mariupol and Kiev – in particular, the institutes of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. They produced the large-scale mosaics Blooming Ukraine, Movement, Victory, Blacksmiths of Modernity, Masters of Time and The Triumph of Cybernetics. After Pryshedko's death in 1978, she continued working on monumental art designs.

1980s – 1990s

In 1981, Zubchenko made the stained glass window Spring, Summer, Autumn for the Institute of Urology in Kiev and various mosaics for the Dubrava Health Resort in Zheleznovodsk, such as Legend of the Narty, Tales and Legends of the North Caucasus and Merry Sun. The remaining sketches and cartoons for these mosaics were transferred to the :uk:Музей шістдесятництва|Museum of the Sixties, Kiev, in 2010.
In 1985, Zubchenko returned to the Carpathian mountains after a long time. She painted The Last Ray of Sun, Rogatynyukiv's Farm, Princess Yaroslava and Carrying Pears and Plums.
Throughout the 1990s Zubchenko worked on a series of more than 100 watercolours depicting Crimean natural sceneries, some of which are in the Simferopol Art Museum and the Sevastopol Art Museum in Crimea. She also painted views of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves and landscapes of Central Ukraine, such as Morning above the Ros. Other works from this period, including The Power of the Spirit and Our Lady of Pochaev, are based on Christian themes.

Exhibitions

Zubchenko took part in several international, national and municipal expositions and organised five personal exhibitions. In 1999, the Embassy of Croatia in Ukraine invited her to stage an exhibition of her works in Zagreb.
Her paintings are in the Museum of Hutsul Folk Art in Kolomyia, the Mariupol Art Gallery, the Kirovohrad Art Museum, the Ivan Honchar Museum in Kiev, the Sevastopol Art Gallery and the Simferopol Art Museum, as well as in art galleries and private collections in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Germany and Croatia.

Gallery