M E : LOOKIN G B A C K

My parents’ apar tment was located in the city centre. At that time the city was still called Stanislaviv. Now it is called Ivano-Frankivsk, the ancient city, the beauty of which has since been disfigured by modern faceless architecture. We lived as a big family – my mother, my father, my grandfather Fedir, my grandmother Maria and us – four young kids. The apar tment was decorated with antique furniture: a fantastic old cabinet, the chairs by the famous Austrian furniture designer Thonet, a huge librar y, and many works of ar t on the walls, some painted by my father and some by his friends.

My parents, Vasyl and Olha Turetskyy, were artists. At the end of the 1940s they, just like most of the Ukrainian academic and cultural elite, were thrown by Stalin into the Siberian camps. They were formally charged based on planted evidence supporting anti-soviet activity. I was born in the settlement for prisoners in the city of Krasnoyarsk on the 17th of August 1956. His Beatitude Patriarch Josyf of Kyiv –Halych and all Rus, also known as Josyf Slipyj, baptized me. He also happened to have been serving a term for anti-soviet propaganda and knew my parents. When I was one month old, my father drew my rst portrait with a pencil on a small piece of paper and sent it back to our family in Ukraine so that they would know what I looked like

A couple of years a er Stalin’s death, my parents were released from the camp and settled in Stanislaviv. Both then worked in the Ivano-Frankivsk regional drama theatre. My father worked as the art director of the theatre and my mother as the deputy manager of backstage production. I had two brothers, Volodymyr and Bohdan, and an older sister, Maria. My brothers and I were passionate about drawing and making things from clay. We copied absolutely everything and anything that would grab our attention. We had almost industrial amounts of plasticine at home. Moreover, we learned how to make the plasticine in the colours and shades that were not commercially available. We mixed it with oil paints and kneaded it until the colour was right – a technique which we brorowed from the theatre’s properties workshop.

We used books from my father’s library to learn about ancient worlds, medieval castles, palaces, interiors and many other things. From the books we used images to make variousgures and objects. It was very precise and exquisite cra smanship. All our objects were designed to accommodate a humangure of 2 cm in height. For example, we used the tip of the needle to assemble Roman warriors and the soldiers of Napoleon from plasticine.

I grew up without any particular duties in my life except for school. Soviet school at that time was so preoccupied with the nuclear war between the USA and Russia that we decided to bury treasure in our yard for the people to remember what a wonderful world it had been. I buried a Roman commander, a knight, a Napoleonic soldier and a miniature copy of Andre-Charles Boulle’s cabinet. The cabinet was most precious. It took me a very long time to reproduce all of the decorative elements. Whilst a student I also studied at the art school.

My favourite media were gouaches and watercolours. They were fast-dr ying and were good for drawing small ornaments and details. My favourite ar tists at that time were Mikhail Vrubel and all of the ar tists from the Mir Iskusstva movement, such as Benua, Bakst and Somov

My carefree childhood ended when Inished school. I had big plans for my future and they required organisation and planning. In 1972, I entered the metal design faculty of the Vyzsnytsia art school. Right a er my enrolment the school changed its prole from ne arts to ethnic design. I found ethnic design to be very limiting and boring and in 1973 I moved to Lviv. Lviv art school had its own unique style, a modern outlook and a very speci c emphasis on composition. I had freedom to create outside of the ethnic or any other limits.

Polish, Romanian and Hungarian art magazines formed my style and my understanding of contemporary art. Books on modern and contemporary art were forbidden in the USSR. My parents had subscriptions to all of the art magazines available at that time. Romanian magazine ARTA and Polish magazine PROEKT were particularly interesting. My father knew the Romanian language and occasionally helped me with translations. I was very impressed by one of the oldest Polish magazines titled Przekroj. It had a very peculiar printing technique that was part of the magazine’s design. The paint sometimes did not exactly match the images and created the same eect as in Andy Wahol’s portraits. I also experimented with the inserts inside the Polish women’s magazines that had sewing patterns in them. It was exciting to colour between the lines, creating abstract labyrinths and mystical codes A er I had worked on them, it was hard to imagine that the transformed images had previously been sewing patterns!

In 1976 I was enrolled into the Lviv Institute of Art and Design. There I met my future wife, Natalka. She was extremely beautiful and a very good artist. I could not help but fall in love with her. In 1978 we got married. In the same year the Soviet government decided to collectively move everyone who lived in basements into apartments. This was due to the 1980 Olympic games where the Soviet Union wanted to showcase the prosperity of its citizens. We didn’t mind the change as the basements were then freed for use as artists’ studios, and there were plenty of them! Myself and Natalka were lucky to get a studio at one of the central locations on Mendeleeva Street in Lviv. By that time we already had two children – Lukyan and Olha. Natalka had to spend more time at home while I continued to work in our studio.

My interest for collecting books and antiques grew and this gave me a chance to meet many interesting dealers and collectors of that era. My studio gradually transformed into an Aladdin’s treasure dungeon. I had an incredible amount of books and objects that I stored in specially created niches. The ceiling was covered in Baroque cherubs, showcasing my collection of the wooden sacred sculptures. Very quickly my studio turned into the meeting point for the Lviv art world. I had so many visitors that sometimes it was hard to explain that I needed to go home.

The Soviet government did not allow exhibitions of my works; they were too avant-garde. Only in the 1980s, at the end of Perestroyka, was I granted an exhibition

At the beginning of the 1990s the iron curtain fell. At that time, the amount of Western collectors and visitors to Ukraine was overwhelming. I sold almost everything I had and only photographed some of the art works. It was the end of the Soviet era and the end of the era of Soviet art.

In 1991 the parliament of Ukraine announced an open call for the design of Ukraine’s State Coat of Arms My hobby of heraldry gave me a chance to apply. At that time I worked in cooperation with the historian Andriy Grechylo. Our project consisted of the design of a full version of the Coat of Arms and the shorter version of the same. They both were based on the state symbols of the Central Council of Ukraine of 1918. The shorter version was based on the idea of the famous graphic designer Vasyl Krychevskyy. It included the trident of the ruler of Kievan Rus, Grand Duke Volodymyr the Great and the wreath around it symbolising the continuity of Ukrainian statehood. The full version had elements symbolising various periods in the history of Ukraine. My design for Ukraine’s Coat of Arms was selected from among 300 other submissions and I was invited to Kyiv to work on the project together with a group of my colleagues – artist Olexiy Kohan and historian Andriy Grechlylo. It was an unpaid project and we even had to bring our own materials from Lviv to Kyiv. On the 19th of February 1992 our trident design became the o cial Coat of Arms of Ukraine. I am very happy to have worked on this project, although I do not consider it to be the main theme of my artistic career.

By that time my brother Volodymyr, Andriy Grechlo, Ivan Svarnyk and I had already designed the Coat of Arms for the city of Lviv in 1990. The Coat of Arms of the city of Lviv was therst Ukrainian modern Coat of Arms that was rid of Soviet attributes, instead showcasing symbols of an independent Ukrainian state. And it was in the Lviv Coat of Arms that we used the trident for therst time in almost a century.

My life has always been of full of wonderful people. While working on the Coat of Arms I met the head of the Ukrainian Philatelic Society of Austria (UPSA), Mr. Borys Yaminsky, and we became good friends. He invited me to design stamps and envelopes for the UPSA, which I gladly did. It was a very productive collaboration. We even presented a series of works to the Chancellor of Austria Mr Viktor Klima Foreign diplomats and ambassadors enthusiastically bought my works. Natalka and I started travelling across Western Europe and the USA, and especially to Vienna, exhibiting our art. While in Vienna, I fell in love with Viennese fantastic realism, which had a big in uence on my art later in life. I feel also extremely honoured to have met the curator of the Graphics Section of the Marlborough Gallery in

New York whom I later befriended. This friendship played a big role in my perception and understanding of contemporary art.

I had been collecting art since my college days and wanted to set myself up as an art-dealer. In 2004, three of my friends and I resolved to open our own art gallery. We called it «Three crowns». The gallery was located at the heart of the town’s artistic district called “Virmenka” at Virmenska Street, 33. Atrst, we had only 40 square metres of space but by 2008 we already occupied the wholeoor in the old building. Between 2004 and 2008 many art objects and antiques passed through our hands. It was extremely exciting. The work in the gallery took up almost all of my time, depriving me of my creative work in the studio. By 2008 I decided to close the dealership and return to my studio where I continue to work today.

Nowadays, modern technologies in art are developing very rapidly but I still prefer to work with oils and canvases. It is important for me that art speaks for itself. Image is of the utmost importance to me. I have a lot of plans for the future. My children and my grandchildren continue our artistic dynasty. My son, Lukyan, works with calligraphy and fonts. My daughter, Olha, works with coloured glass My granddaughter, Martha, has just started at art school and wants to be became a painter. I have great enthusiasm for work. Every day is a new beginning.