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of the Kapschutschenko family and that the most recent fruit of this association was an English translation of Plastyka Petra Kapschutschenka , a monograph about the life and work of Petro Kapschutschenko, soon to be published in Kyiv. (The monograph, originally written in Ukrainian by renown art historian and critic Oleksandr Fedoruk and illustrated with numerous photographs, was published in 2004.) “I am privileged to be here today,” Dr. Kar- pinich stated, “and honored to speak about someone I have known not only as a talented individual but as a man with a distinctively generous Ukrainian soul.” He noted that the years of communist rule had wreaked havoc on the community of artists living in Ukraine, and that it was the endeavors of emigre artists like Petro Kapschutschenko that had kept Ukrainian art alive; it was these diaspora artists who had permitted Ukrainian art to evolve rather than stagnate and perish. Kapschutschenko, he commented, took his talent from Regensburg to Buenos Aires to Philadelphia, but never forgot his Ukrainian roots, and this is evidenced time and again by the patriotic themes that can be seen in many of his sculptures. Kapschutschenko’s life in the diaspora, Dr. Karpinich continued, began in a manner familiar to most post-war emigres. He arrived in Argentina with a single dollar given to him by a sailor during the ocean voyage from Europe to South America. He spent the money on medicine for his infant daughter and faced the new environment and an alien culture with nothing but his hands and a will to create a new life for himself and his family. Working as a common laborer by day and sculpting at night, Kapschutschenko did not reveal to the people he worked with that he had been educated as an artist. Instead, he began slowly building a new reputation for himself, a reputation that would not come from his past but from new sculptures created in a new land. It was a long and arduous road that the artist traveled for more than ten years before his work was recognized. And during this journey, the work itself took on a new face: The kozaks and chumaks now shared their space with gauchos and dancers with a marked Latin flavor and Petro Kapschutschenko became Pedro Enko and was feted as a rising star among Argentina’s cultural elite. Of the 5,000 or so sculptures Kap schutschenko created during his years in Argentina, continued Dr. Karpinich, no two were identical. Yet each was a reflection of something human, a quality that was not lost on art critics or art lovers or even the academic community: Kapschutschenko was named honorary member of the Universidad Libre de Humanidades in Buenos Aires. Dr. Karpinich then spoke of Kap- schutschenko’s own comments about his work. “I need peace and quiet to create my ‘halushky’ and my subject matter is sometimes Ukrainian and sometimes Argentinean. But it is Ukraine that inspires me to work.” And it was the people of the Ukrainian village, Dr. Karpinich observed, that were often the subjects Kapschutschenko re-created in bronze and wood and clay: men and women working, trampled but not extinguished by Soviet rule. He loved working in clay. Clay, when heated, changes color, and Kapschutschenko was intrigued by this and experimented with the process involved: “Before I had a thermometer, I did this па око.” In 1963, Kapschutschenko and his family , immigrated to the United States and settled in Philadelphia, where he became an active member of the Ukrainian Artists’ Association in the United States, joining other emigre artists whose goal was the preservation of Ukrainian art forms banned in Ukraine under Soviet rule. He exhibited his sculptures in numerous one-man shows as well as in joint exhibits with fellow artists. In Philadelphia, Kapschutschenko also joined such creative luminaries as Oleksa Hryshchenko, Petro Andrusiv, Keynote speaker Professor Volodymyr Karpinich
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