GRAPHICS BY VASIL CHEGODAR

Abstract

Vasyl Chegodar is an outstanding Ukrainian painter of the second half of the 20th century, who left behind huge contribution. Throughout his creative life, he was actively involved in graphics and worked as an illustrator in periodicals. For several decades, he created portraits of famous figures, cityscapes, among which predominated Kyiv genre scenes, illustrations for literary works published in specialized magazines. Simultaneously he also created graphic works "for himself", that is, purely for his own creative needs. The second large group of great interest consists of portraits, series children's theme, as well as landscapes and still lifes. Unlike illustrations for periodicals, these works, with the possible exception of a few, were never published. Some of them are preparatory drawings for painting and some are independent works of art. Graphics became a kind of laboratory in which creative searches took place and the artist's thinking was vividly manifested. V. Chegodar reached out to graphics for fifty years. The analysis of the finishing work in half a century made it possible to trace the changes in the creative manner from the very beginning of the work to the end of the master's life, the specifics of the use of certain graphic techniques. Graphics accompanied V. Chegodar all his life and certainly influenced the master's painting. That is why a more thorough study of this voluminous part of the work is of great interest. The purpose of the article is to study the achievement of V. Chegodar in the field of graphics, to identify the artistic features of graphic works for Ukrainian periodicals and artworks created for realization of own creative needs.