Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Maria Prymachenko

Maria Oksentiyivna Prymachenko (1908-1997) was a Ukrainian village self-taught folk art painter who worked in the naïve art style with drawing, embroidery and painting on ceramics.A peasant woman, Prymachenko was born in the village of Bolotnya in the north of the modern Kiev region of Ukraine.Born to humble means, Prymachenko earned fame in her lifetime for dazzlingly colorful and wildly inventive scenes of animals — lions, birds, horses, and other beasts — covered in riotously hued, almost psychedelic patterns.Born to a peasant family near Chernobyl, the artist suffered from polio as a child, an illness that left her confined to bed for much of her childhood (a later surgery would enable her to walk independently).Her illness instilled a great sense of empathy for the suffering of others, and her caring for all living creatures was to become an important element in her art.Prymachenko found her sources and themes in the decorative wall paintings that were prominent features in Ukraine, in lullabies, folk legends, and fairy tales, and in the nature that surrounded her.In her pieces, the artist unites her marvelous internal world with the age-old tradition of folk  and pagan culture.In 1966, Prymachenko was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine, one of the country’s highest honors, and in the last decades of her life admirers supplied Prymachenko with materials to create larger format works.More of Maria Prymachenko’s inspirational ethic art can be found at ArtNet and WikiArt.