We open the page of the Ukraine’s current artistic life with a story about artist Yuriy Bazavluk.
Scientific articles, researches and essays about contemporary art in general will not bypass the Rubicon of a historical event that has become the drama of the centuries – this is the aggressive war of russcism (Russian fascism) against Ukraine… And the story of a man who became an artist by awakening his historical, ancestral roots.
Let’s start with the amazing intertwinings, synchronicities and patterns of Yuriy Bazavluk’s ancestors lives.
At the time when the Zaporizhian Sich was disbanded by the devastating decree of Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, Cossack elders were given land plots. Thus, the Zaporizhian Burliuk, Bazavluk and Krychevsky became owners of land plots in the city of Lebydyn. Centuries later, the descendants of the Cossack warriors entered the history of world art as innovative artists, pioneers in the worlds of a new artistic worldview and world reconstruction.
Much has been written about the life and traditional attire of the Cossacks, their wayward, independent nature and character, but little has been revealed, because true history was destroying – chronicles, correspondence and sacred objects were seized and often ruined.
The family memory, through the centuries, returned the great masters of the brush to their original sources and gave impetus to such a unique direction as the Ukrainian avant-garde in its folk original sources by Boychuk, Krychevsky and others.
Yuriy Bazavluk was born in Kharkiv, his childhood and youth were spent in Putivl. There are cities that breathe ancient times. The fate brought the parents of future artist to this city due to appointment after graduating from a Kharkiv higher educational institution. Kharkiv educators still remembered the “Slovo” building and its many, by then, executed residents – Les Kurbas, Semenko, Ostap Vyshnia, Mike Johansen, Volodymyr Sosiura…
Yuriy’s father was an artist, and grandfather was an educator who took a direct part in forming the artworks collection of the Sumy Museum. Yuriy felt the first impression of painting as incredible – before his eyes, his father, mixing paints on a palette, transferred them to the canvas, where young Yuriy saw how trees, sky, living images came to life in everyday life. Under artist’s hand, everyday life has been transforming into a majestic celebration of witchcraft. Since then, scent of pine and linseed oil, that reign in painter’s studio, for Yuriy, have become what foreshadows a state of inspiration and creative work. And nature. It becomes a teacher and a window into Universe for future artist.
Yuriy Bazavluk accumulates the impression of a pioneer from everything he does, whether it be morning fishing, professional doing of business, many years of immersion in the world of judo (in the gym of the Kyiv Dynamo stadium), meeting people who will become a life’s role model for Yuriy – Tetyana Holiyembiyevska.
There were books in the man’s life that pushed his measured life forward, gave him that degree of freedom that allowed him, like the hero of “The Moon and a Penny”, to devote himself for servicing the painting.
There are not so many ways to “creating an artist in the world” – it is a progressive, relentless learning from studio to art school, from school to academy. There is another, more complex, unpredictable way, when the X factor, or more precisely, divine providence, comes into play – this is the way of many authors of the Paris School, some world-renowned musicians.
When the necessity, the vital need to paint comes in adulthood. Artists such as Auguste Rodin, Vincent Van Gogh, accumulating emotional, sensual, aesthetic experience, building their skill gradually, step by step, came to a certain “boiling point”, and then a powerful stream of unusual, original, sometimes brilliant paintings came into the world.
For Yuriy Bazavluk, it is the awakening of the gene of freedom, liberation from everything that squeezes the soul and doesn’t allow to breathe fully, the gene of the Cossack freewoman, a historical memory that carries within itself the accumulated, prayed-for actions – education, Cossack military service to the Fatherland, even shoemaking (which, along with blacksmithing, was considered one of the ancient sacred occupations from ancient times).
What his ancestors did during the historical period of Ukraine’s formation, the iconic ancient cities of our country, which manifested their historical significance for the artist, precisely through the life way of his parents, grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
In the time of his blooming youth, Yuriy Bazavluk settled in Kyiv. Besarabka, the slopes of Pechersk, parks and the mighty Dnipro with its beaches and park areas, theatres, especially the Opera and Ballet Theatre, became for Yuri what gave him creative inspiration and motivation.
However, as in most times, then Kyiv and Ukraine had, as it seemed, two histories, two pictures of existence, two streams of culture. Externally, Kyiv of the 1960s-1980s ranked second in Europe in terms of the number of green spaces and park areas. The generation represented by Yuriy Bazavluk had few opportunities and conditions for its individual development, and people’s wages were stable. Inside, there was a different reality: a “culture of denunciation” flourished in the country – those who disagreed with the existing order in the country were persecuted by the KGB.
Official art was supposed to serve the system, not the person. Almost every research institute inevitably contained people, mostly young people, who read anti-Soviet literature; illegal circles of intellectuals appeared in higher educational institutions who were not satisfied with serving an anti-spiritual system that devalued the individual; the natural inclination to learn about one’s own history and culture was declared a criminal dissident activity.
Based on the history of his own family, Yuriy Bazavluk chose honest service to art. After many years of work in business, he thinks about the need to fully devote himself to creativity, to painting.
As for teachers in the world of artistic life, skill, people who influenced the formation of the artist, there were few of them. The example of his father gave the first lessons of service to art and the belief that art is able to change a person for the better. Working at the Putivlovsky Plant as an industrial artist-designer, by order of the plant management, he painted large copies of famous paintings on the factory wall, as it was believed, to optimize the stimulation of the work process of the plant’s employees.
Almost half a century later, such methods will be called the program of aesthetic education of the working class. And all these are pages of living history, which the family of the future painter Yuri Bazavluk lived.
In the 1970s, the then October Palace in Kyiv was famous for its painting studio, where Yuriy studied under the guidance of the People’s Artist of Ukraine Vasyl Zabashta. Many famous painters visited the studio in their youth, which became not only a school of skill, but also gave the first skills for the life of a professional artist. The studio teachers were remembered by Yuriy for the rest of his life not only as a person of his youth, but also as a wonderful insightful teacher. According to people of Yuriy’s generation who lived in the capital of Ukraine at that time, Kyiv in the 1970s-1980s was a city full of cultural and artistic events.
The Bessarabka district, where the Bazavluk family now lived, next door to the future Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, is located not far from the republican stadium “Dynamo”, where the hero of our story went to practice judo. And again, fate, providence leads Yuriy Bazavluk closer and closer to his secret dream of becoming a professional artist – in the gym he meets his peer Albert Jabbarov, who introduced Yuriy to his world of painting, shared the artistic achievements that he received at the T.G. Shevchenko Art School. And later he became one of the most beloved students of Tetyana Holiyembiyevska, a significant artist not only for Ukraine.
An innate sense of aesthetics, a gravitation towards meditative literature, with its measured rhythm of narration, a passionate love for those manifestations of art that illustrate the times of historical, landmark events of our country. And let the pictures from Cossack life look on the stage of the opera house as a theatrical performance should look – the slightly simplified festive, magical, deeply national music of Hulak-Artymovsky fascinated Yuri, enchanted him, gave him an amazing illusion of returning to those times of the Cossack era, when he wanted to live himself, stand at the origins of the times that were landmark for our Ukraine, breathe the air of a free woman, a free Cossack spirit. “The Cossack Beyond the Danube” becomes a landmark opera for the artist.
The more paintings Yuri creates, the more creative energy and inspiration he receives. He lives by the code of sincerity of creative return to the viewer, not limiting himself to elegant exhibition halls for exhibiting paintings. The author considers the format of a public library as a democratic, accessible and relevant location.
So forever in the biography of all of us who were touched by the inhuman, demonic entrepreneurial war of today’s Russia against Ukraine, this event will remain in our biography, will manifest itself in the works of musicians, masters of the word, and artists.
Building on the foundation of the Parisian school of painting, the tradition and innovation of such authors as Osmerkin (born in Ukraine), representatives of the art of scenography of the first decades of the 20th century, involving elements of Italian mannerism of the Renaissance era in his work, Yuriy Bazavluk creates paintings of anatomical semantic sound, when the urban landscape, types of nature, with prolonged observation, begin to be intensely saturated with colour, acquiring a certain volume. In part, this effect arises due to the combination of open bright colours with contour black isolated objects, which the artist reproduces. The art of contemplation, as a meditative spiritual practice, is transferred by the author directly to the canvas. And then, as was defined above, the picture acquires profound semantic aspects.
Yuriy Bazavluk keeps and preserves his “image bank”, “storage of impressions” in his memory. He can store a certain image in his memory for decades and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, actualize it on canvas. Then such a landscape acquires a somewhat fantastic meaning, because it undergoes the experience of waiting in time until it appears in the world.
Every person in life inevitably has an image, an event, a story that can become a tuning fork, a reference point for a system of values, to some extent.
For director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, an apple orchard during the summer, when it is pouring, became such a symbol of unbridled will, creative impulse, freedom. Mykola Gogol, seeing a theatrical performance for the first time (it seems that it was a home theatre), keenly felt the existence of that system of social games that make a person dependent, unfree. And Gogol “dressed” such a human drama in the clothes of a satirical, ironic form of narration. Fernand Léger, once peering into the outlines of the city’s urban structures, consolidated this impression, later creating his own unique style.
For Yuriy Bazavluk, such an impressive symbolic event was “Palm Sunday”, which he observed in his youth, when Christian holidays, as well as the church itself, were banned. This beautiful, secret ritual with lit candles carried to the church at night, mostly by elderly women, struck the imagination of the future artist. And the aromas of the night, filled with the smell of blooming willow branches, were remembered by Yuriy for the rest of his life. And his iconic painting “Palm Sunday” will participate in more than one exhibition.
Using the power of natural lighting, the artist creates very effective effects to convey the drama of the cycle and human life on this earth (metaphor: the human cycle is like the cycle of the Sun – birth, zenith, sunset).
Yuriy Bazavluk’s paintings are distinguished by a combination of passionate brush movements on the canvas combined with the accuracy of the compositional rhythm. The author synthesizes the methods and techniques of the French School with the best traditions of the Ukrainian school of painting.
Since 2024, a dramatic year for Ukraine, painter Yuriy Bazavluk has organized about 30 personal exhibitions. In each of his paintings, a person’s great love for his land is visibly present. In each work, we can not only see, but also read our history.
Bazavluk’s landscapes subtly call on the viewer to protect and defend the priceless gift, our Ukraine. His landscapes illuminate the powerful power of a person who realizes the vital necessity of painting and only painting. Such a passion for work is perhaps explained by the fact that, unlike most painters, Yuriy Bazavluk joins professional painting in adulthood. This is how parents treat a “late” child with special feeling and attention. And the energy of love here sounds in a special range.
Natalia, Bondarenko, art critic, Kyiv
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Gallery of selected works by Yuriy Bazavluk
