TETYANA YABLONSKA
1917–2005
Tetyana Yablonska
Tetyana Yablonska has won numerous prizes and honorary titles. Striking dissimilarity of such canvases as Sacking Grain (1949), The Nameless Heights (1969), Evening in Old Florence (1973) testifies to the constant artistic quest to the wish to convey her own sense of time. Yablonska’s art often gave rise to debates and hot critical discussions. She is surprisingly capable of changing her style and emerging in a new quality every time. She may work simultaneously in different genres, different techniques, even in different kinds of art. Yet, she never appeared to be, and never was, an extravagant pioneer. Her unusual sensitivity to whatever is new and promising, lo whatever seeks an outlet, ready to be moulded into new imagery or new plastic forms, invariably attracted young artists to her side. Yablonska`s experience, mastery, her lectures and essays are a veritable school of art. Her artistic evolution is instructive. In the fifties she was known as an artist whose dominant theme was the joy and happiness of life. This had some justification. The mother of three children, she lovingly portrayed the harmony of the child and the world around him, the beauty of nature, the charm of carefree youth, creating a large number of small genre paintings. Yet at the same time she was developing the makings of the master of large-scale paintings, of epic, monumental images.
In the sixties, Yablonska paints mostly huge, monumental canvases. One of the best is The Nameless Heights (1969). Its genre could be termed as “heroic landscape”.
She worked with gusto on a series of colourful, characteristically national painting, the Ukrainian motifs. The series was a success, and some individual paintings gained wide popularity because the author exhibited her sound knowledge of people’s daily life and folk art. However, naive works of folk artists attracted her not only by their festive riot of colours or cheerful vitality, akin to her own temperament and outlook. Talking about folk art, Yablonska explains, “As an artist I am attracted to their simple and sound philosophy of life, their uncompromising attitude to life and duty, their age-old wisdom.”
The early seventies ushered in a new phase of Yablonskaya’s art. Studying the inner world of her contemporaries, she finds it consonant with lucid and pure images of old Italian masters. Even the colour scheme of her paintings retains a reflection, so to say, of the art of Quattrocento. They show the attention to detail, to the beauty of the objective world, but are devoid of naturalism. An instance of this is her well-known self-portrait, entitled Evening in Old Florence.
Last decade finds Yablonska investigating the harmony of man and the world. Man and nature in her paintings are united by the feeling of reverence towards all living things. In landscapes painted in the late seventies she concentrates on problems of artistic medium. Her small canvases are filled with pensive beauty.
The art of Tetyana Yablonska treating different aspects of life, different human problems; it always remains frank, sincere, open to the world and people.