I make sunny flowers because I love people, I create for joy, for happiness, so that all nations love each other, so that they live like flowers all over the earth...
Maria Pryimachenko
Maria Pryimachenko (Pryimachenko), an artist representing "naive art," was born on January 12, 1909, in the village of Bolotnya in the Kyiv region. Her works amazed the art world and are now kept in the most famous galleries not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia, France, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, Canada, Belarus, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Poland, the Baltic states, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, and Georgia.
From childhood, she had to overcome polio. Maria Pryimachenko was convinced that this disease was caused by a curse. She endured pain for three days, then her father took her to a local healer by cart. After that, one of her legs became covered with scabs and became shorter. She remained disabled for the rest of her life and moved around on crutches.
Maria Pryimachenko began her creative career by painting her own house. Once, while herding geese, she saw a strange bird that had shed feathers from its wing. There were colorful stripes on the ground where the feathers had fallen. It was blue clay. She picked it up and painted the walls of her house with blue flowers.
The artist has more than 800 paintings to her credit, 650 of which are kept in the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art.
In 1937, Maria Pryimachenko received a gold medal at an international exhibition in Paris. She never got to hold this award in her hands. It was sent to Ivan Gonchar, who also participated in the exhibition, and the medal was lost.
The motifs of Maria Pryimachenko's work are her love for Ukraine, her native land, nature, and people, her desire to create "for joy," reflections of folk life and mythology, but also the struggle against war and evil through fantastic symbolic animals, transforming fear into something funny and decorative. Her works are filled with a holistic worldview, where fantastic animals and plants live in harmony (or conflict) with real life, and captions reveal deep meaning.
Maria Pryimachenko's works testify to the fact that behind them lies a large, diverse school of folk art and centuries-old culture of the people. It is like a cluster of emotional impressions from fairy tales, legends, and life itself. Pablo Picasso admired her paintings, and many works by another admirer of Pryimachenko's art, Marc Chagall, show the influence of the Ukrainian artist.
From 2015 to 2021, an annual festival dedicated to the outstanding artist was held in Kramatorsk. Concerts, master classes, and fairs were organized for the townspeople. In addition, festival participants decorated the city space with original sculptures, and in 2018, they painted a fence on the street named after Maria Prymachenko with mythical characters, good animals, and amazing colors.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation changed the city, but even today it preserves the drawings of sunny flowers and good animals in memory of the incredible, unique creativity of the Ukrainian artist.