Information about the work
The work Morning Song [Vranishnya Pisnya] (oil on canvas, 1987; acquired for the Sumy Regional Art Museum collection in 1991) is rendered in a stylized, flattened, and decorative expressive manner. A successful synthesis of two genres—landscape and animalier painting—immerses the viewer in a narrative set in a farmyard near a house, where numerous representatives of the domestic animal world have gathered. The lower section of the painting depicts a small house behind a fence and a structure with open doorways, in front of which are domestic birds and a cat curled into a ball. On the roof stands a rooster with a long, lowered neck. In the upper portion of the canvas, the bodies of animals are chaotically intertwined and twisted in a close-up arrangement, among which the heads of a goat with a kid (on the left) and a stag with branching antlers (on the right) stand out. A striking accent in this dynamic, chaotic composition is the depiction of part of a pink piglet’s body.
The canvas is imbued with irony and filled with symbolic elements: fantastic creatures, various animals, geometricized objects, houses, and fences. All of this creates a sense of a complex, multilayered world where reality and imagination intertwine. The artist populates the yard with whimsical animals, offering a layered game. On the first level, the viewer does not immediately notice the small characters “living” near the dwelling—geese, chickens, and cats. They form that “small world within the painting” so vital to the author.
The color palette is contrasting and emotional: warm shades predominate—pinkish-ocher, red, orange, and yellow—intertwined with cool tones of gray and blue. At the center of this vertical, multi-vector composition with its many “characters,” there appears a tentative human figure, difficult to discern as it almost merges with the surrounding animal space. It represents an authorial imagination—that lingering remnant of the artist’s dream that has not yet dissolved upon waking, though it has already lost its coherent form. Bright, rich in color and movement, this expressive composition underscores the interaction between humanity and nature while simultaneously reflecting the chaos of the modern world. It is not a literal depiction, but an emotional image open to individual interpretation by each viewer.