Girls Carrying Water

Portrait of Ivan Franko

Princess OlhaThe Kyivan princess in ochre and gold, two small figures at her feet. Held by the Ukrainian Women's Association of America — a women's organisation bought a woman ruler painted by a woman.

Girl with a JugA face, a headscarf and a jug — three planes of yellow and blue.

SpringtimeIndian ink and gouache, almost pure line. A rare case in Mazepa where colour nearly disappears.

At the CampfireFigures around a fire, built from yellow and orange wedges.

The Tale of the Little DuckA girl among birches and birds. Gouache for a children's edition — the side of Mazepa's work that won her a UNESCO gold medal in 1980.

The PondWomen with buckets at the water. It survives only as a black-and-white reproduction.

WasherwomenWomen washing at the water — red, yellow, pink. One of many Mazepa subjects built around women and water.

Hahilky (Springtime Rituals)A spring round-dance in white on green and turquoise. Painted in Caracas, where spring in the Ukrainian sense does not exist.

ShepherdessesTwo shepherdesses among sheep and little huts. It survives only as a black-and-white reproduction.

Rapt AudienceListeners around music — a scene assembled from planes of red, yellow and white.

«Sleep is Walking by the Windows…»After a Ukrainian lullaby. Painted in 1947, two years after Mazepa lost two sons in Prague.

Basket with FruitA still life from the Prague years, a year after she finished the Prague Academy of Fine Arts.

At the Fortune Teller'sNine years after Fortune-Telling of 1946, Mazepa returns to the same scene — now in Caracas colour.

Factory GirlsMazepa's first Venezuelan subject — factory women against the city. It survives only as a black-and-white reproduction.

Girl with SnowdropPainted in 1947, in the last months before the family left for Venezuela.

Fortune-Telling («Three Girls»)Three girls over a bowl of water. Painted in Germany in 1946, when Mazepa's own fate was still undecided.

Portrait of Volodymyr KovalThe artist's husband, an electrical engineer in Prague. The earliest work in the album — Mazepa was twenty-three.

SelfportraitHalyna Mazepa at forty, in her third year in Venezuela — after losing two sons and her mother in the 1945 bombing of Prague.

Cossacks (ceramic plate)A painted plate 30 cm across — horsemen running round the rim. In 1952 Mazepa spent a year in Europe deepening her ceramic technique, then taught it in Caracas.

CossacksTwo men with raised sabres, stacked on a tall narrow canvas. Mazepa's last return to the cossack subject — thirty-one years after The Ballad of Cossack Bayda.

Cossack MamayThe canonical subject of Ukrainian folk painting — a cossack with a bandura and a jug — rewritten in Venezuelan red.

Bathing GirlsThe third return to the same subject in eighteen years. Three yellow figures against blue.

The WitchesWitches and a red beast — a companion to Forest Nymph, same year and same elongated format.

Forest NymphA mavka laid along a canvas nearly three times wider than it is tall. Mazepa was 67, and still painting Ukrainian mythology in Caracas.

Bathing GirlsWomen at the water — a subject Mazepa returned to all her life: 1957, 1961, 1975.

Zaporogue CossacksTwo men with sabres at their belts, built from red and orange planes. A companion piece to Fighting Cossacks.

Fighting CossacksA sabre fight broken into red and yellow wedges, almost to abstraction. The same year her relief of the Protecting Veil took first prize at Venezuela's National Salon.

The Ballad of Cossack Bayda (II)The second sheet of the same 1946 series. Pale gouache, nothing yet of the Venezuelan fire to come.

The Ballad of Cossack Bayda (I)Bayda Vyshnevetsky, hanged on a hook in Istanbul. Mazepa made this in Germany in 1946, between losing Prague and leaving for Venezuela.

Water-NymphsHalyna Mazepa's first year in Venezuela. She painted these Ukrainian water-nymphs in Caracas, ten thousand kilometres from the river they came out of.

Composition with a White CockerelThe cockerel is an image Selsky returned to in both oil and gouache.

Little CloudThe sixties are when form in Selsky's work begins breaking into planes.

Mykulychyn LandscapeMykulychyn in the Carpathian foothills was one of the places Selsky returned to work.

InteriorAn early interior — a subject Selsky returned to all his life.

At SofiivkaPainted in the year the war ended.

Meeting in a Field. ZhovkvaOne of the earliest Selsky works in this collection.

Wind in a CornfieldTwo years before his death. In all, Hnizdovsky made more than three hundred and seventy prints.

Ear of CornAn ordinary thing treated as if it were a portrait.

Sheep in a PenA dense mass of wool built out of thousands of small cuts.