Fedir Konovaliuk

Fedir Konovaliuk was born in the village of Kalivka in Podillia, now Yahidne in Vinnytsia Oblast. He trained first in the icon-painting workshop of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra from 1903 to 1909, then at the Kyiv Art School from 1911 to 1915 under Volodymyr Menk and Oleksandr Murashko, briefly at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Petrograd from 1915 to 1917, and finally at the Kyiv Art Institute from 1925 to 1927 in Fedir Krychevskyi's studio. In the 1900s and 1910s he painted church interiors in Kyiv and Katerynoslav (now Dnipro), and he went on to work for many years in partnership with Ivan Yizhakevych, the two of them producing large bodies of illustration for Ukrainian literature, including Kotliarevskyi's 'Eneida' and the poems of Shevchenko. He continued the tradition of the Ukrainian painters of the turn of the century rather than following Soviet developments, and his work is characterised by miniature scale and a very fine sense of colour. What sets his landscapes apart is their specificity: they are views of a named, recognisable place at a particular season and often a particular day, and he sought no especially picturesque subjects, holding that beauty was already present in any corner of nature. He was drawn all his life to the old Ukrainian village — thatched cottages, clay-daubed walls, wattle fences — and his pictures were, as the art historian Ihor Sharov puts it, too openly national to fit the ideological requirements of Socialist Realism, which kept him at the margins of official recognition. He told his wife that his paintings were his children, who should outlive their parents and carry their name. He lived and worked in Kyiv and died there in 1984; a retrospective was mounted by the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR in 1966 and a centenary exhibition catalogue was published in 1990.