True masters, the Chinese say, are always in the shadows. They never come into the public eye, into the circle of light, on a stage or an armored car or a championship pedestal. They don’t promote themselves whenever possible. They work modestly, honing their skills, isolated from prying eyes and visible only to the closest and most chosen. Worldly fame, popular attention, and all the material bonuses associated with them pass them by. By definition, they are not honor-hungry or silver-tongued.

    The first time I saw her work was in the early 1970s, when I was a boy-at a stand in the corridor of a school near the literature room-and I was delighted beyond belief. Those were incredibly expressive landscape sketches painted during a trip of a literary group. I also painted, and so Olena immediately became my idol. Later, in adulthood, when I got to know her daughter Nina, we became close friends.

    Olena Zenich received an amazing, most thorough professional training. She became a true master of hand-drawn graphics and animated films. Dozens of brightly and recognizably illustrated books for children, teenagers, adults, fiction and popular science, and hundreds of drawings for magazines and textbooks.

Her painting was a real alchemy, with many hours of jewelry processing of every square centimeter of the artistic plane. Like Grabowski’s seamstress, “from early morning until late at night.” She boldly used incredible techniques that she often invented herself, using, for example, eggshells or fine sand from the Dnipro River.

    Unfortunately, only a handful of her vast body of original works remain. The predatory, monopolistic “Soviet” publishing policy in the pre-copyright era (and afterwards as well), ignoring and circumventing copyright in every possible way, brazenly appropriated the author’s originals, which disappeared without a trace into the obscurity of editorial archives or became the subject of “black” collecting.

    Olena Zenich’s pinnacle work, the illustrations for Charles de Coster’s Till Ullenspiegel, which she worked on tirelessly for two years, were never published. I remember how, by some miracle, several illustrations from this series accidentally came to the attention of experts from abroad. And Olena Zenich was immediately officially invited to New York to work permanently at a well-known book publishing house under a solid contract. But she didn’t go for a bunch of reasons she made up for herself. Because such a rose could only bloom in her native land.

Olena’s archive of works is kept by her family in Tatarka, a small residential neighborhood in Kyiv that has already seen eight Russian cruise missiles since the beginning of the war. And it would be grossly unfair and unfortunate if this unique work remained unappreciated and unaccepted by the general public, forgotten and dissolved in the maelstrom of the war.

    “The Girl with the Unicorn” is an absolute masterpiece of the artist. This is a recurring theme of medieval and Renaissance art and literature, when it is the chaste and kind-hearted Virgin who is the only one who can attract and tame the untouchable, elusive mythical Unicorn, a symbol of purity and virtue.

    Chronicles say that the last unicorn was hunted in the sixteenth century by our countryman, the valiant nobleman Bernard Pretvych, in the groves around his estate in Sharivka in Podillia, and its horn eventually ended up in the treasury of the Austrian emperors in Vienna. This is very gratifying, even though it turned out to be the tusk of an ordinary narwhal. But we know very well that only a truly pure soul can recognize a real unicorn. Probably the same as the unforgettable, brilliant, magical artist Olena Zenich. An incomparably beautiful, exquisitely aristocratic and truly intelligent woman. Both from the outside and from the inside. A generous, kind, and sincerely and unostentatiously religious person who will remain in memory forever.

Varel Lozovyi, artist and writer

For reference:

Olena Zenich (3.08.1956, Kyiv – 7.08.2021, Kyiv)

Education: Art and Industrial College (now the Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy), Graphic Department of the Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute, Kyiv Branch (now the Ukrainian Academy of Printing).

Participation in exhibitions:

1984-1989 – annual republican exhibition of illustration and book design “Artist and Book”, Kyiv;

1991 – exhibition of Ukrainian graphics, Turin, Italy;

1995 – International Children’s Book Fair “Bologna’95”, Bologna, Italy;

1996 – international exhibition of illustration, Osaka, Japan.

In the 1980s and 2000s, she collaborated with publishing houses and magazines:

“Osvita, Veselka, Soviet School, Odnoklassnyk, Genesis, Svit, Forum, Dnipro, Hrailyk, Borysfen-S, Molod, Aconite, Ukrainian Ethnography, Ranok, Zodiac-EKO, Svenas, Pioneer, and Barvinok.

1979-1982 – worked as an artist at the Ukrainamovie studio with famous Ukrainian animation directors Volodymyr Honcharov and Iryna Hurvych (Kyiv).

2010s – worked with international advertising agencies, Kyiv.

Awards:

1984 – M. P. Trublaini Prize;

1986 – recognized as the best in her profession in 1985 by the Trade Union Committee of Freelance Graphic Artists of Kyiv;

2000s – “Art of the Book of Ukraine” award for a 7th grade Ukrainian literature textbook.