Skip to content
Call Us Today! 212-533-4646 | MON-FRI 12PM - 4PM (EST)
DONATE
SUBSCRIBE
Search for:
About Us
Publications
FAQ
Annual Report 2023
Annual Report 2022
Annual Report 2021
Initiatives
Advocate
Educate
Cultivate
Care
News
Newsletters
Sign Up For Our Newsletter
Join UNWLA
Become a Member
Volunteer With Us
Donate to UNWLA
Members Portal
Calendar
Shop to Support Ukraine
Search for:
Print
Print Page
Download
Download Page
Download Right Page
Open
1
2-3
4-5
6-7
8-9
10-11
12-13
14-15
16-17
18-19
20-21
22-23
24-25
26-27
28-29
30-31
32-33
34-35
36-37
38-39
40
Pandora’s Parcel to Ukraine. 1993. NATALKA HUSAR’S BLACK SEA BLUE BY MARTHA BOHACHEVSKY CHOMIAK With our complex relationships to the land of our parents and to our country, our generation may not yet have a voice, but we do have a portrait. The canvasses painted by Natalka Husar, especially after her visit to Ukraine in 1992, are disturbing, as is any great art. The layering of images, romantic, tawdry, kitschy, realistic, twisted and haunting are as disturbing and as real as a violent dream that both reflects our mood and shapes it. Husar’s paintings are not pretty. Their grotesqu eness at times borders on satire. Yet as truly great satire, it cuts through the laughter to the salt of tears. Husar, at least for me, has captured the Ukrainian expe rience. I would like to be able to write in the way she paints. First, the layering. Image overlaid with image, all related, in a style that reminds me of the best of Virginia Woolf’s prose. The reduction of the images to words is as difficult as translating a haunting symbolist poem into a different language: the danger is not so much simplification as distortion of the mood. Husar creates the layering of moods, the layering of things that are transformed into images, and then on top of them, the crack of brutally frank humor that rolls like summer thunder on the Cossack steppe. Second, Husar encapsulates images of embedded past reality. Where in her American-Ukrainian canvasses she captured both the strength and the hilarious absur dity of some of our diaspora social rituals, in the Ukrain ian work she probes beneath the totalitarian reality in starkly simple images. The bemedalled suits emerging and merging into cobblestones that flow into the wells of a dungeon that itself becomes a flowing river faced by open mouths eyeins sausages and hams, and the painter holding her head in front of an open window that is a window to the past. Or in another brilliant can vas, Odessa’s Tears, Husar constructs a collage around the opposite tip of the Black Sea to Odessa’s location, the Black Sea outline fitting in with Odessa’s steps and Chumak wagons and Cossack weapons, with Turkish kerchiefs in the geographical area of Anatolia, and jars of cherries. And from the steppes, where the Ukrainian salt traders trekked, guided by the milky way, haunting female limbs, sweet and graceful, covered by flowing white sheets and roses that flow into umbilical mem branes. On closer look, the sheets take on images of tired grieving hands, of bundles tied around vegetables, peasant street vendor women, and bare bloody feet trudging through the steppe, the tundra, the markets, and the world. And in the corner, little painted toys, sweet and loveable and incronguously blending into the picture. Finally, the whole of Husar’s work cannot be reduced to one genre, as our experiences cannot be reduced to one simple feeling, one clearly cut identity, one limited goal. Despite the obvious scope of talent she posseses, there is, however one thing Natalka Husar lacks. She lives by her easel, and while she has recognition among Canadian and American artists, most Ukrainian Ameri can women have yet to give credit to this Jersey born artist for integrating the various trends of our experien ces. Actually, Husar does not lose from this lack of recognition. We do. 24 НАШЕ Ж ИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ 1996 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
Page load link
Go to Top
1 
2-3 
4-5 
6-7 
8-9 
10-11 
12-13 
14-15 
16-17 
18-19 
20-21 
22-23 
24-25 
26-27 
28-29 
30-31 
32-33 
34-35 
36-37 
38-39 
40 
