Oleksa Zakharchuk

Born 1929

In March 1944, after service with the partisans in Ukraine and having lost his family in the early days of the war, Oleksa Zakharchuk found himself in a children's home in the east of the country. He had always had a bent for painting and he took to drawing profile portraits of his friends. These were declared such successful likenesses that it was agreed he should learn to become an artist. At the age of 15 he started to attend the art college in Kharkov, from which he graduated with honours in 1950.He then transferred to the Kiev Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied for a further seven years under the tutorship of Tatyana Yablonska.

Zakharchuk is known above all as a master of landscape painting, and he stands out among his Ukrainian contemporaries for the diversity of his formal devices and the delicacy of his atmospheric effects. He was first commissioned to make monumenta works of applied decoration - the 'progressive' artistic genre of that time in the Soviet Union - but he soon broke away to study and depict natural phenomena in large landscapes. His preferred medium is oil or pastel, but he also works in pencil, chalk and gouache.

His technique concentrates on retaining the fundamental image only, removing from consideration all that may be superfluous, secondary and incidental.His distinctive blend of emotion and precision, simplicity and sophistication, achieves its object by stripping natural forms of their details without reducing them to mere schemes or symbols.

Through this dual approach - at once romantic and rational - he represents nature in lyrical and integrated compositions, his forms sometimes dissolving into air, sometimes gathered into solid masses. Transparent glazes impart an inner luminescence to his paintings. The subtlety and imperceptibility of his colouring and tonal transitions suggest an elusive, fugitive environment, yet the essence of the natural scene is sensed as an indivisible entity. These are vivid, lucid visions of harmony and beauty: the clear depth and profound silence of the world.

Zakharchuk has been a member of the Ukrainian Union of Artists since 1966. His
works are to be found in museums in Kyiv, Moscow and Odessa and in private
collections in Ukraine, Russia, the United Kingdom, USA, Germany, Argentina, Israel, Italy, Hungary and Australia. His first UK exhibition was organised by Danusha Fine Arts and held at the Mall Galleries in April 2007.

	Born 1929 In March 1944, after service with the partisans in Ukraine and having lost his family in the early days of the war, Oleksa Zakharchuk found himself in a children's home in the east of the country. He had always had a bent for painting and he took to drawing profile portraits of his friends. These were declared such successful likenesses that it was agreed he should learn to become an artist. At the age of 15 he started to attend the art college in Kharkov, from which he graduated with honours in 1950.He then transferred to the Kiev Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied for a further seven years under the tutorship of Tatyana Yablonska.
	Zakharchuk is known above all as a master of landscape painting, and he stands out among his Ukrainian contemporaries for the diversity of his formal devices and the delicacy of his atmospheric effects. He was first commissioned to make monumenta works of applied decoration - the 'progressive' artistic genre of that time in the Soviet Union - but he soon broke away to study and depict natural phenomena in large landscapes. His preferred medium is oil or pastel, but he also works in pencil, chalk and gouache.
		His technique concentrates on retaining the fundamental image only, removing from consideration all that may be superfluous, secondary and incidental.His distinctive blend of emotion and precision, simplicity and sophistication, achieves its object by stripping natural forms of their details without reducing them to mere schemes or symbols. Through this dual approach - at once romantic and rational - he represents nature in lyrical and integrated compositions, his forms sometimes dissolving into air, sometimes gathered into solid masses. Transparent glazes impart an inner luminescence to his paintings. The subtlety and imperceptibility of his colouring and tonal transitions suggest an elusive, fugitive environment, yet the essence of the natural scene is sensed as an indivisible entity. These are vivid, lucid visions of harmony and beauty: the clear depth and profound silence of the world. Zakharchuk has been a member of the Ukrainian Union of Artists since 1966. His works are to be found in museums in Kyiv, Moscow and Odessa and in private collections in Ukraine, Russia, the United Kingdom, USA, Germany, Argentina, Israel, Italy, Hungary and Australia. His first UK exhibition was organised by Danusha Fine Arts and held at the Mall Galleries in April 2007.

View the Zakharchuk collection

Born 1929