Petrykivka painting
A form of folk decorative ornamental painting that took shape in the mid-nineteenth century in the village of Petrykivka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It is based on improvised floral compositions built from a few set types of brushstroke.
Petrykivka painting grew out of wall painting: houses were repainted several times a year before major feasts. In the early twentieth century women began transferring the designs to paper and selling them. In 1913 Dmytro Yavornytskyi commissioned the artist Yevheniia Evenbakh to copy fragments of the wall paintings, the first official record of the tradition. Tetiana Pata is regarded as the founder of the Petrykivka style; Nadiia Bilokin and Yaryna Pylypenko were among the early masters.
Compositions are usually asymmetrical, with flexible lines. The main motifs are flowers and their derivatives (leaf, «onion» bud, bud, viburnum) and, less often, birds: the rooster, the cuckoo and fantastic birds. Two types are distinguished, ornamental (plants only) and narrative. Painters use a homemade cat-hair brush called a koshachka, a reed stalk and the fingertip; round berries are printed with a small swab, the kvachyk. Plant dyes bound with egg yolk came first, later replaced by aniline paints; the traditional palette is yellow, red, blue and green on a white ground. The black ground is associated with factory-made lacquered woodware, which developed in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Petrykivka School of Decorative Painting operated in 1936–1941. In 1958 a workshop for under-lacquer painting was opened (later the Druzhba factory, from 1989 Petrykivskyi Rozpys, closed in 2004), together with a children's art school. Today the tradition is sustained by the Petrykivka Centre of Folk Art.
The element is on Ukraine's National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2012). In 2013 «Petrykivka decorative painting as a phenomenon of the Ukrainian ornamental folk art» was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the first element from Ukraine. Petrykivka painting is a specific local tradition, not a general name for any Ukrainian floral painting.
