Kateryna Krychevska-Rosandych created her first Ukrainian series of watercolors from memory

By Heorhii SHYBANOV

Kateryna Krychevska-Rosandych is one of the brightest stars in the great pleiad of contemporary Ukrainian artists, who have been scattered all over the world. She has long been living on the West Coast of the USA, but her heart has always belonged to Ukraine. Her wonderful works invariably impress the viewers.

Mother Nature has lavished talent on Krychevska-Rosandych. From her early childhood years she was raised in a special artistic atmosphere in Kyiv. She has inherited a great talent from her mother, father, and grandfather, because she was born into the well-known Krychevsky family. The names of this family’s representatives are engraved in golden letters on the tablets of the history of 20th-century Ukrainian art.

Krychevska-Rosandych’s grandfather was Vasyl Krychevsky (1872 — 1952), an outstanding architect, painter, and graphic and theater artist. Her uncle on father’s side, Fedir Krychevsky (1879–1947), was a widely known painter, one of the first rectors of Ukrainian Academy of Arts, worked there as a professor for many years before World War II. He was a teacher of many gifted painters who added outstanding works to the treasury of the national art.

Krychevska-Rosandych’s father, Vasyl Krychevsky (1901–1978), was also endowed with a great artistic talent. He was a painter, graphic artist, and decorator. He created the stage set for Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s world-famous film Zemlia (Earth) and costumes for the performers of the famous Dumka choir in France in 1929.

According to Krychevska-Rosandych, she learned many tricks of the trade in the painting technique and style from her mother Olena, who was an excellent colorist and produced a great number of wonderful landscape paintings, etudes, and drawings. As a student at the Department of Theory and History of Art in the Kyiv State Institute of Arts (now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture), I would often peer at the paintings by the Krychevsky brothers, which were on display at the Institute’s museum. It never crossed my mind back then that in the late 1990s I could have a chance to meet their descendants?

Krychevska-Rosandych is a very cheerful lady with a beautiful soul. Everything that is connected with Ukrainian culture is dear for her. She was one of the first diaspora Ukrainians to notice my publications about Nester Horodovenko (1885 — 1964), an outstanding choirmaster and pedagogue, which were published in the journal Novi Dni in Toronto, Canada. At one point, I found a letter in my mail box from Krychevska-Rosandych, sent from California. Enclosed was a very rare picture of Horodovenko. She took a picture of him in Toronto in 1954 near Saint Volodymyr Cathedral. She decided to help me with collecting materials about Horodovenko and his hard artistic life. This is how we got in touch. From Krychevska-Rosandych’s letters I found out about the Krychevsky family and the hard experiences of Ukrainian intelligentsia, which had to go to different countries of the world as it could not bear the oppressive atmosphere of Stalin’s regime.

Krychevska-Rosandych started painting while she was still a child. “My mother was both my first teacher and my first critic. She had a great artistic taste and a feeling for what was real and what was fake in art. She taught me some very important lessons,” said Krychevska-Rosandych. When she was still a teenager, she had a chance to interact with her talented family and therefore was able to master the realistic style of the Krychevskys’ painting manner.

Kyiv Art School became the starting point for Krychevska-Rosandych’s artistic education. However, the Second World War put an end to her high hopes and in 1943 she had to emigrate together with parents to the West at the age of 16. They first lived in the Czechoslovakia, and Krychevska-Rosandych continued her studies in the Art and Industry School in Prague. When the Krychevskys moved to Germany Kateryna studied at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.

When the immigration routes to the countries of North and South America opened up, the Krychevskys moved to the USA and settled for good in California. Their life in immigration was not easy. Kateryna’s parents had several jobs and enjoyed no privileges. However, they managed to cope with all the hardships and never stopped creating art. With time they won recognition and set up a normal life.

Kateryna showed her first works to the public already in 1943. After two years she received the second prize at the International Art Exhibition in Mannheim, Germany. In the 1950s, art buffs had a chance to see her paintings in many cities of America and Canada. I was fortunate to see some of her amazing watercolors for the first time in the friendly home of the historian Mark Antonovych in Montreal.

Since 1949 she had over 50 solo exhibits in the USA, Canada, and Ukraine. Since 1956 her oeuvre have consistently been put on display in such art galleries as Gump’s Gallery in San Francisco, Olha Sonevytsky Art Gallery in New York, Vanchytsky Art Gallery in Philadelphia, EKO Gallery in Detroit, the Ukrainian Museum in Cleveland, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, the National Art Museum in Kyiv, the Taras Shevchenko Nature Preserve in Kaniv. Her works are also part of many private collections in the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Czech Republic, Argentina, France, Ukraine, and other countries and are reproduced in calendars and postcards.

With her never exhausting artistic work Krychevska-Rosandych became extremely popular all over the world. Her paintings have received many positive reviews from experts on different continents.

In 1959, the artist made a grand tour of Europe, which had long been her dream. She visited Germany, Austria, and Italy. Together with her uncle Mykola they did a lot of plain-air drawing for an entire month in Venice. She finished her great trip by visiting Paris where she painted a series of wonderful watercolors. While she was just mastering the hard technique of this kind of art, she always admired work of her uncle Mykola, a great master in this area. He lived in Paris and was well-known in the artistic circles in France. Krychevska-Rosandych also often feasted her eyes on the exquisite works of the English artist Edmund Dulac. Eventually, Krychevska-Rosandych was able to finally find her own painting manner, which reflected her artistic and esthetic vision and her skill of conveying the tiniest details in numerous landscapes, architecture motives, etc.

Krychevska-Rosandych also had a good personal life. In 1958 she met a handsome young Yugoslav Drago Rosandych, also a former immigrant. They got married in 1959 and had a daughter Lada, who showed a penchant for painting and later became a designer. The Rosandych family built a house in the small city of Mountain View near San Francisco where they live now.

Watercolors and gouaches by Krychevska-Rosandych are impossible to confuse with works of any other artist. They are special because of her great skill to paint from life and convey in paint her own associations from what she sees on the sea surface, on the city street, or in an old building. Her every watercolor is a complete story which reaches beyond the framework of a sketch. She remains faithful to the traditions of the classical watercolors. Her works stun the public, evoke the feeling of seeing real art, and make one dream, experience, and feel encouraged.

Krychevska-Rosandych created a large series of works about Ukraine. This was not easy as she could not draw from life in California. But with her good knowledge of illustrative materials and her parents’ works and keeping her childhood memories, she was to create amazing images of different ethnographic regions of Ukraine, such as Hutsulsky Velykden (Hutsul Easter), Rizdvo v Karpatah (Christmas in the Carpathians), Putyvl, and others.

In 1993, one of Krychevska-Rosandych’s long-cherished dreams came true. Together with her husband she visited Ukraine, bringing along many paintings. She was very excited to see Kyiv. The first exhibition of her work took place in the Poltava Museum of Regional Ethnography, which was designed by Vasyl Krychevsky’s grandfather, and the second one, in the Ukrainian National Art Museum in Kyiv. Many people have visited these exhibitions. They had a chance to see and open up for themselves the rich artistic world of Krychevska-Rosandych.

Krychevska-Rosandych handed over a great number of her own and her parents’ works to museums in Kyiv, Poltava, Kaniv, Sumy, and Lebedyn. This gesture was highly appreciated by the cultural and artistic community in Ukraine. The artist went back home with unforgettable impressions from visiting her motherland and with a great number of watercolors and sketches, which she made here.

Krychevska-Rosandych was awarded the title of an honorary professor of the National Academy of Art and Architecture and won the Taras Shevchenko Prize. She told about her own and her parents’ artistic paths and their life in Czechoslovakia, Germany, and the USA in the book Moi Spohady (My Memories, 2006). The volume also contains numerous photos from the Krychevskys’ family archive, published for the first time. They are of a great interest to researchers and those who are interested in the history of Ukrainian art.

Source: http://www.day.kiev.ua/en