Honoring my creative lineage: Maria Prymachenko

This month, I will write a series of vignettes and poems honoring my creative lineage, which includes the people and forces that have shaped me, prayed for me and dreamed me into being, so that I may walk my own empowered path guided by them and the gifts they shared with me. 

Maria Prymachenko - Ukrainian Folk Artist  

Maria Prymachenko in 1936

I first came to know Maria’s brilliant artwork when news broke out that many of her paintings were deliberately destroyed by russian missiles during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 while hanging at the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum.

Her colourful and delightful (what felt almost child like in its composition) art pieces depicting visual and literary folklore, natural imagery, political statements and curious mythological beasts stirred something deep within. It felt familiar and ancestral.

She has since become an honorary ancestor who is continually a source of inspiration for me in the ways her art embodies a Ukrainian creative spirit.

Maria was born in 1908 in the village of Bolotnia, in Kyiv Oblast. As a survivor of Stalin’s 1933 Holomodor, a genocidal famine which killed more than 4 million Ukrainians, her paintings show so much beauty and goodness and also pain and terror.

She was completely self-taught and never received artistic training. She painted, drew and embroidered themes that interested and inspired her imagination. When Picasso saw her exhibition in Paris, he said “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian”. Many of her paintings came to her through dreams.

Maria’s vibrant and colourful characters and traditional Ukrainian folk imagery make me happy to look at because it’s a celebration of the simple and profound things in life: imagination, nature and our connection to it, kindness and the spirit of sharing. Maria also did not shy away from making courageous political statements against war and against the proliferation of nuclear power.

Her life and work inspires me to continue to paint my world in colour whether it is through kind gestures, acts of service, writing and my creative teaching work that helps folks to connect to their own inner creative force. We are meant to share our creativity with the world so that we can embody our authentic essence, that child-like and joyous spirit that lives (and wants to play and create) in all of us.

I am grateful for the example that Maria offers me through her art: living with curiosity and free will, listening to intuition and the dreamworld and expressing herself fully in vibrancy and colour.

I stand on the shoulders of so many giants like Maria Prymachenko. With gratitude and awe, I am because we are.