The Formation of the Post-Impressionist Trend in the Creative Practice of Oleh Harahonych

Abstract

The article examines the artistic experience during the period of 1980–2000. Oleh Harahonych’s individual painting style was formed at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s under the influence of a large-scale talent of the famous Ukrainian painter Yosyp Bokshay (1891–1975). O. Harahonych visited Bokshay’s Uzhhorod workshop several years in a row. Having escaped the system-defined academic education, the post-impressionist-to-be was experimenting with the new formal means of reproduction. Being primarily a landscapist, the painter began to develop new dynamic angles of the composition, involving the fragments of a high-altitude highway in presentation of his works, which ensured that his landscapes obtained a sense of modernity. Winding Carpathian roads suggested to the artist a zigzag structure of the composition, which was based on the principles of polar dynamics. In O. Harahonych’s landscapes of the mid‑1980s, the contrast of warm and cold color gradations and intensity of colors enhanced. The dominance of pure colors harmoniously combined with simple shapes that focused on an acute triangle. The renewed lyrical sense of the landscape was reproduced by the simplest artistic means which included decorative ornaments, logic of compositional accents, and clarity of silhouettes. It was realized in a series of plein‑air images of the 2000s. In search of new visual means, Oleh Harahonych’s imagination was ahead of the visual technologies of easel painting of that time. Developed in the 1980s, the author’s style visually resembles the digital presentations in Photoshop. The author’s synthesis of color and form reveals an integral connection between post-impressionism and design, which Roger Fry called “Vision and design” in his book a century ago.