Shevchenko’s masterpieces to be depicted in sculpture

The city stone sculpture festival Zhyvyi Kamin (Live Stone) will start in Cherkasy in August. This year it will be held for the fifth time. This means that one more stone sculpture avenue will be added to the four already existing ones. If the previous festivals were dedicated to Cossacks, love, sport, and even the creation of stone water fountains, this time the sculptors were offered to direct their attention to Taras Shevchenko’s paintings.

Therefore, at the end of the summer, city dwellers will be able to see Gipsy Fortune Teller, Kateryna, King Lear, Bandura Player, Dying Gladiator, Kazakh Woman, Diogenes, Image of Taras Shevchenko, Peasant Family, and Robinson Crusoe. The organizers let each sculptor choose an image that was the most appealing to them. Andrii Datsko, a sculptor from Lviv, who has already participated in this festival before, said he was impressed by the symbolism of the King Lear engraving. “I wanted to combine modernity, motion, resistance… One turns to the King Lear theme even these days, because it remains topical. Besides, the plot has much in common with Ukrainian reality. Shevchenko’s engraving shows King Lear walking with the Fool. This is a very symbolic image,” Datsko explained.

Famous sculptor from Cherkasy Mykola Telizhenko is going to carve a bandura player out of stone. “A sculpture always has to possess distinct meaningful features. When I create a sculpture of Cossack Mamai or a bandura player, I always refer to Shevchenko’s images. I have already prepared a few versions of the new sculpture. I want the strings to emerge from the ground and rise to the sky. But the stone itself is going to dictate the shape and plastic, because the nature should not be bound to some strict rules, instead we should learn from it,” the artist said. Cherkasy is also going to obtain its own Diogenes. Sculptor Ivan Lavrynenko thinks that “the one who is sitting in a tub” has always been spiritually close to Shevchenko.

Meanwhile, director of the public utilities enterprise “Dyrektsia Parkiv” Oleksandr Radutsky assures that the artists will be able to start working on sculptures within a few days. “The sculptors will carry out the primary processing of the stones on the territory of the woodworking complex. Blocks of stones two to two and a half cubic meters large have already been delivered there. These are sandstone blocks from Vinnytsia oblast,” Radutsky said. After the primary carving of blocks is over, the future sculptures will be moved to the Yuvileiny Park, where the artists will resume their work and park visitors will be able to see them.