Paintings that sing

Vivaldi’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Mozart’s Trio; Concert by the Candlelight; Haydn. Farewell Symphony – painted musicians play in the white silence of the exhibition hall, each line plays its tune, and color scale forms chords.

Halyna Hryhorieva, the author of the “singing paintings,” was born in Kyiv in 1933, graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute, and her father, the famous artist Serhii Hryhoriev, was her first and main teacher. Her artistic style was based on the quiet shine of freedom and love for the subject matter of her paintings. During the 1960s, in the period of a powerful outburst of the musical, artistic, and literary life in Kyiv, she created a series of watercolors dedicated to music. “When my son Ivan found my watercolors made in the 1960s in the studio and brought them to me, they stroke me with their young drive! And I decided to react to them in gesso,” said the artist.

Another theme of the exhibit is flowers and herbs, trees and lakes: the captured moments of the world of natural beauty, lost for city dwellers, in her paintings The Dnipro Creek, Apple Tree Branch, Dandelions, and Garden. There are two girls on bridges over the water, one peeps inside a jar with a goldfish swimming in it, and the other gracefully bends and watches the fish in the river (Goldfish). A rainbow of philosophical senses opens in paintings Still Life with Matisse Tapestry, Remembering Pompeian Frescoes, Those Who Run and Jump.

The name of the exhibition reflects the key motive in the artist’s creativity: “to live a simple life wisely,” look for inspiration in the nature and music, to be all-seeing and self-rigorous. Each new exhibit by Hryhorieva is a new summit, which lets the audience come closer, touch, and listen to the beauty of the world.

“All themes in this exhibition seem to be so full of life, warm, dear, desired, that it is impossible not to feel something long expected and necessary for us,” emphasized artist and art critic Dmytro KORSUN. “It is about the beautiful fresco school of St. Sophia Cathedral, about Kaniv with its river and creeks, a glorious place for the soul. The artist spent her childhood in Kaniv, and the fundamental sense of the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian space, Ukrainian childhood is present in her every painting. They are highly artistic in their own way, they are created very honestly, when the artist destroys a few versions before getting to the final and the best one, trying to reach the classic standards of the work. Such discipline, imparted by the old school, is now extremely rare for our artistic world. This exhibition is like the beginning and the end of time: you can find the 1930s, and 1950s, and 1960s, and our time, “times mix here like waters” (Arsenii Tarkovsky).”

“In Halyna Hryhorieva’s paintings I like the softness, which comes from the deep trust of the artist in herself. There is no aggression and violence, neither over the painting nor over herself, nor over audience,” said artist Temo SVIRELY. “This creates a contemplative moment of contact with the world, the internal harmony and natural intelligence of her paintings.”

“A certain moment has come, when I am not equal to my mother yet, but she consults with me in the process of work,” said artist Ivan HRYHORIEV. “And her work process happens in such a way, that no matter which way the idea develops, everything comes to integrity and completeness. My mother surprises me with her power of painting! Her works are very modern, they have something that art lacks very much today: it is not ‘I expressed myself,’ not ‘this is the way I see it’; instead, they contain truth which pours onto a person, and if you are able to be its conductor, then you can broadcast the universal truth, open it for the viewers. I think that the music series of the paintings, the reply to the past, is exceptionally successful. That stage is over, and as Eastern sages say, ‘I was like that back then.’ But the return is possible sometimes: it is not easy to see your own quality in a new way, and it was like a revelation for my mother.”

“When you look at Halyna Hryhorieva’s paintings, you experience a deja vu,” said art critic Oleh SYDOR-HIBELINDA. “This happens due to the presence of a specific archetype of absolute harmony, the feeling of the paradise lost, when people dissolved in the surrounding nature and beautiful women lay on the river bank. Music scenes from the 1960s were a revelation for me, where modern rhythms are boldly intertwined with symphonies by Mozart, Vivaldi, and Haydn. The artist lives in two equally comparative dimensions: contemplation on the river bank and admiring the gifts of art, listening to music in the civilized context. And there is no contradiction between these dimensions, they are interrelated because the whole nature is filled with music. Hryhorieva’s art is the absolute confidence of the brush, calm clarity, and crystal transparency.”