CV/Bio
Education
Natalya Petrenko-Litvinova was born in Ukraine in 1970. Now lives in the city of Kiev, and works in different countries of the world. She received a higher art education at the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine (1989 — 1995). Since 1995, Natalia is a member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine, and since 1998 — a member of the Union of Designers of Ukraine. “Painting is my passion, graphics are inspiration, and graphic design is exercises for the mind,” is how the artist speaks about her work. And he adds that for her it is a completely natural constant desire to master the different genres and directions of visual art.The artist skillfully uses magnificent technique, color and picturesque strokes to convey emotions and forms. «The creative process is an interesting path to new discoveries.»The artist participated in more than 30 creative exhibitions in different countries, including personal exhibitions in Ukraine, Finland, France, Austria.
1981 — 1988 — State Art School named. T.G. Shevchenko (Kiev, Ukraine).
1989 — 1995 — successfully graduated from the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
Affiliaitions
1995 – a member of the National Artists’ Union of Ukraine.
1998 – a member of The Designer’s Union of Ukraine.
Exhibitions
December, 2018
By Dimitri Korsun, leading Ukrainian art critic.
NATALIA PETRENKO-LITVINOVA
Nowadays, inspired by the spectacular Giverny gardens, Natalia paints flowers. She daringly stylizes and synthesizes the forms of nature; she draws directly from nature and recreates according to her imagination, creating the world not empirically plausible but imaginable. These features bring the artist closer to the principles of folklore, where the ordinary is complemented with the fantastic. As in the flowers by Kateryna Bilokur… Natalia clearly presents not a form of folklore but its spirit. She strives for transparent harmony of the image, for the most expressiveness and completeness, to create a formula of nature purified from everything inessential.
Natalia combines the real and the imaginary, the spiritual and the material, inherent and invisible with non-accidental ease. Actually, it’s a consequence of the creative freedom of the developed artist. All the art of Natalia, attracts with spiritual stability and visual harmony, and glorifies the tastefully designed self-contained world of family well-being.
The former rooting in the artistic culture and high craftsmanship of past epochs has now been replaced by the newest ideas about the color and composition of the picture. The painting becomes modern. Life and time march on; everything changes, and art is changeable, too. Natalia even occasionally feels signs of subconscious anxiety, as if she does not know what style to prefer to express the modern world through. It seems she can do everything, thus far. But anyway, for a true artist the only rivalry does always counts – the competition with the ‘artistic secrets’ of the old masters. It’s like an ongoing dialogue with the classics and an inner standard of the one’s mastery.
Natalia is an excellent book illustrator. She’s able to speak the language of past epochs and stylize the spirit of a particular time. So, she has prepared for publication a collection of Petrarch’s sonnets with her own numerous “pictures”. Here it is – her book with a thin leather cover, which is very nicely, even complimentary fits in the palm of a hand, and so deeply disturbs with the re-creation of a love-and-soul aura of the great art style of quattrocento. Indeed, the style of her book graphics is very close to the graceful manner of such acknowledged masters as Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Cranach… This style is high and perfect, since this is the time when beautiful Laura lives and Petrarch makes his virtuoso platonic ‘sighs’ towards her in his poetry. ‘…By day, by night, a thousand times I turn Where best I may behold the dear lights burn…’
Thanks to the work with book graphics, Natalia has developed a capacious, rational and economical spatial vision; she masterfully conveys emotional states, physiognomic types and stage scenes, foreshortenings and draperies. Her fine taste was brought up, as a result. Now, she is able to do everything at the most demanding professional level. That’s why one can look at these graphic with admiration, for a long, long time. And there, she is so infinitely gentle, accurate and beautiful. She seemed to live among the masters in those times… Such pieces allow us to say the artist presents not only the studied but also the deeply lived through experience of the classics in her artistic work.
But on the other hand, as a categorical imperative for any genuine, sincere artist, Natalia still has a plainly trustful viewpoint towards the world. She never searches for any sophisticated paradoxes, disproportions or imbalanced shades, being a woman who is harmonious already in her primary essence.
The artist understands the nature of color. She is fond of impressionism. The impressionism of separate brushstrokes that so habitually predisposes to the expectation of happiness, to the feeling of multicolorism and preciousness of life, to the immersion into joyful blinks, the very ‘French’ atmosphere of the ‘museum’ Sisley, Pizarro or Claude Monet.
The organic connection between Natalia’s graphic and pictorial works – that is between easel painting on canvas and illustrations for book, as well as designs of church stained-glass windows – one can explain with the unified poetic nature of her imaginary range. She does not split herself between the techniques but smoothly expresses herself within them all. She worries about in vein, as her world exists in peaceful unity, ontological fullness, no regard to the presentation technique.
Certainly, the art of an artist is closed in its internal integrity. The world of a creator is always hermetic, refined and individual. The world of Natalia Petrenko-Litvinova is like that. But even this refined art of the ‘elite’ responds to today’s challenges and anxieties of the world, the world of permanent lack of harmony and humanity.
Nowadays, the artist loves to write flowers, and this is her urgent need which is close to everyone… She repeats it like a poetry, like an inner mantra: ‘Ah you, a flower, you are like the breath of the Divine – and of life itself’.
Natalia has had exhibitions in France, in Giverny, the favorite town of Claude Monet, where the gardens and flowers planted by the founder of impressionism around his house are blooming up. As one can expect, when depicted with Natalia’s brush, these flowers from Giverny are wonderful, fragrant and delightful. The color matter of the canvases becomes lively, filled with vitality and emotionally fluid. It blooms the life itself… There is a thin but dense veil of valeur modulations remaining on the canvas; it’s like the poetries vibrating within the bounds of cold and warm, or as the phenomena of the reconciled dying and birth.
For Natalia, reliance on the nature’ life and the color palette it contains is still important. According to the Academy’s of Arts sermons, she pays exceptional attention to the coloristic dialectic of the pictorial image, to the life of color as the basis of the very foundations of the painting culture itself. And then, it seems the true flowering of her art is still ahead.
It means, one can see a visible contribution the artist makes to the traditions of the Kiev Painting School.