Pavlenko, Oksana

Pavlenko, Oksana [Павленко, Оксана], b 12 February 1895 in Valiava, Cherkasy county, Kyiv gubernia, d 21 April 1991 in Moscow. Painter. In 1914 she began her studies at the Kyiv Art School under Fotii Krasytsky and Fedir Krychevsky. In 1917 she enrolled in the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts and studied under Mykhailo Boichuk. She continued her studies in Boichuk’s Workshop of Monumental Painting at the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (1918–22). In 1919 she was part of Boichuk’s team that decorated the Lutsk regimental army barracks in Kyiv (destroyed in 1922). She also took part in the experimental fresco painting on the walls of auditoriums of the Kyiv Institute of Plastic Arts (these frescos were destroyed in 1934). While teaching painting, drawing, and ceramics at the Mezhyhiria Tekhnikum (1923–9) she painted the frescoes there, titled Consultation in the Village (1925). Among her paintings of these years are Making Pyrohy (1918), Scutching Hemp (1920), Mariika (1920), In Shepetivka (1925), and a self-portrait (1925). In 1929 she moved to Moscow where she taught in the ceramics faculty of the Moscow Higher State Artistic and Technical Institute (1929–31) and, later, in several other schools. In 1933–35 she visited Ukraine on several occasions to paint with Boichuk, Vasyl Sedliar, and Ivan Padalka the frescoes, later destroyed, in the Kharkiv Chervonozavodskyi Ukrainian Drama Theater. Although Pavlenko continued painting her style became more naturalistic and lost the attributes typical of the Boichuk school. Most numerous among her later paintings are still lives and flower arrangements executed in water colors. Her memoirs about Mykhailo Boichuk were recorded and published by Leonid Cherevatenko in 1987.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kravchenko, Iaroslav. Shkola Mykhaila Boichuka. Trydttsiat sim imen (Kyiv 2010)

[This article was updated in 2012.]