Artistic code by Natalia Zastavna

Natalia Zastavna in her studio. Photo from 2023.

When writing about the work of Ukrainian artists today, it is difficult to ignore the context of the war, which not only had a dramatic impact on each of them individually but also changed the internal configuration of the entire artistic community as a whole. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russian troops, the circle of Ukrainian artists was divided into three large camps: some took up arms and joined the ranks of the Armed Forces, others took up volunteer work, and others continued to create. However, all of them shared a common goal: to win the war, destroy the enemy, and preserve Ukraine's statehood.

Like many other artists, when the war began, the famous Lviv artist Natalia Zastavna could not take up her brush for a long time, instead, she directed all her efforts to volunteer work. Dozens of bulletproof vests and radios, hundreds of items of tactical clothing and tactical medicine went through her hands, and at the right time, they were sent to the frontline, to the defenders of Ukraine. Later, after recovering from the initial shock of the depressing events in the country, she returned to her art.

The artist was born in 1988 in Novyi Rozdil, Lviv region. Although the artist received her professional education at the Lviv Polytechnic at the Department of Design, her main teacher and mentor in painting was her future husband, the artist Serhii Hai, who is widely known far beyond Ukraine. She began her exhibition activity in 2012 at the International Autumn Salon "High Castle", after which she took part in more than fifty group exhibitions, plein airs and symposia and held five solo exhibitions in Lviv, Kyiv and Ternopil. The artist's works are kept in private collections and museums of contemporary art in Ukraine, Europe and the USA.

Today she has more than a hundred paintings of various formats and techniques. The genre diversity of her work includes portraiture, landscape, still life, nude, animal painting and narrative painting.

Tracing the development of the artist's visual language over the past decade, we can identify the leading stylistic techniques and plastic solutions of her work. Laconicism and simplicity of the image interpretation, unpredictable angles, strongly built compositions, emphasis on texture, expressiveness of layers of paint splashed on the canvas, and fixation of the fleeting moment - these are the main characteristics of Natalia Zastavna's works. The thematic range of her paintings ranges from intimate chamber single-figure compositions to animalistic images interpreted monumentally. The artist conducts a subjective painting experiment, uses a conscious simplification of images and expressive means, departs from the established aesthetic guidelines of academic art, finding an impetus to search for a new form. "I deal exclusively with pictorial problems: I explore how colour, texture, composition affect the human psyche, the human soul," the artist says.

In her work, we will not find conflicts, social issues or dramatic tension. Women in relaxed poses with a glass of wine in their hand, powerful male sidekicks, various animals, birds and flowers make up the artist's imaginative world, in which there is no place for cruelty, hatred and aggression. Her works are not narrative, but rather sensual. In her works, Natalia Zastavna depicts the bright side of life - this is most characteristic of her authorial nature. The formula of the artist's art has an optimistic colouring. Perhaps that is why in the first days of the war she could not work creatively.

Some of the artist's works are related to the works of Serhii Hai both on the thematic and formal levels. However, in them, we find more calmness, tenderness, femininity, as opposed to the stormy lava-like flow of the artist's creative energy. Particularly touching is the cycle of works on animal subjects, where the artist does not prescribe details, but primarily shows the state of a particular animal. There is a bull that confidently stares at the viewer, occupying almost the entire space of the painting, a cat that lounges on the table next to a flowerpot, and numerous sheep, bears, crows, tigers in various angles.  

A pair of meerkats depicted against the background of a conventional landscape is extremely expressive. On Natalia Zastavna's canvas, the animals are frozen in a characteristic pose: stretched out at full height on their hind legs, folding the front ones in front of them. The content of the work is the fixation of a pause in the unrestrained movement of life, while the selected animals are just a tool for expressing the essence of this concept. That is why they are interpreted simply, in a generalised way, without prescribing specific features and details. The colour of the painting is warm. The dominant ochre of various shades is emphasised and complemented by beige, orange, deep brown and black. Light spots in the background give the painting depth, spatiality, and clarity of the outline of the foreground figures. The feeling of movement stopped for a moment is emphasised by sweeping, dynamic brushstrokes, colour streaks, rhythmic light spots in combination with heavy dark brown planes of the background and the local colour of the pose (Meerkats).

Untitled, 2019. Canvas, mixed media, 110 x 60 cm.

Natalia Zastavna usually does not give titles to her works, leaving a certain space for speculation, flight of fancy, and the viewer's participation in the interpretation of the chosen motif. When painting a particular image, the artist does not strive for a faithful reproduction of the object or portrait resemblance of the depicted character. On the contrary, in her work she balances between realism and abstraction, often leaving only a hint of a certain form.

The image of a person in the artist's portraits is a symbolic reflection of something majestic and large-scale. By limiting the psychological and naturalistic characteristics of the model, she focuses not on depicting this or that person on the canvas, but on reflecting their emotional state. In this case, individuality fades into the background. One of the artist's most expressive works created during the war, a portrait of a woman in a red dress, is marked by structural simplicity and lightness. The canvas depicts the figure of a woman in a sitting relaxed pose. Laconic in its semantic content, the plot attracts the viewer with its picturesqueness and unobtrusive emotionality. In this work, we can observe the simplification of the plot in favour of the pictorial content. The artist focuses the viewer's attention on the plasticity of the female body, her stretched pose. The first violin in the colour sound of the composition is played by red, which does not vulgarise, but gives only a slight hint of eroticism of the depicted heroine of Gauguin's Tahitian type. The chosen tonality of contrasts of blue in ochre and red harmonises the composition built on contrast. Everything here, in this moodily laced painting, is imbued with calm and harmony ("Woman in a Red Dress").

Untitled, 2023. Canvas, mixed media, 80 x 120 cm.

Landscapes of Natalia Zastavna are marked by the verification of composition, coherence of colour and picturesqueness of the picture plane. There are few of them in the artist's oeuvre. The objects depicted on the canvas usually do not have a hidden semantic meaning. The artist does not paint nature from nature, but extracts images from the depths of her imagination. She does not reproduce this or that landscape in a reliable form, but only uses the image of nature to express her mood, the state in which she is at a given moment.

An illustrative landscape of the artist is a work that she worked on for several years and completed in 2023. Made in cold colours, it evokes a sense of calm and harmony. The viewer's attention is attracted not by the plot of the painting or its hidden meaning, but by the picturesqueness of the canvas. The multilayered paint, the vibration of colour, the interspersing of planes with tonal and colour transitions, the richness of textures and textures - this is what the artist manages to achieve in this work. The effects and techniques used by the artist allow the viewer to wander for hours on the picturesque plane and enjoy the richness of colour.

Untitled, 2023. Mixed media on canvas, 80 x 100 cm.

In general, the artist actively experiments with colour and composition in her works. An important expressive tool for her is the texture and texture of paint. The freedom of superimposing strokes, coloured planes, spots and paint drips gives rise to unpredictable effects on the canvases. By pouring paint onto the canvas, scratching it with a spatula or rubbing it with sandpaper, Natalia Zastavna achieves the desired texture that cannot be repeated. The main tools in the artist's studio are brushes, palette knives and construction spatulas. To create paintings, she uses acrylic, oil, texture pastes and additional materials, usually working on canvas, less often on cardboard.  

 Sketches of future works are rarely made - the artist's creative method implies the freedom of the image. Instead, before starting to work, she resorts to "painting", a certain immersion in the creative process. Like a skilful musician who checks the instrument, warms up his fingers and enters the appropriate state before performing a piece, turning himself into music, the artist has to tune the strings of her inner pictorial sense. She randomly applies spots, paint drips, strokes and lines on small cardboard, and only then approaches the full-size canvas. From the spots and coloured planes that appear on it from under the artist's brush, a future image is formed, which gradually becomes clearer and takes the form of a portrait, landscape or still life. At this moment, the artist sensitively recognises the structures of her own unconscious and, discarding everything superfluous, extracts an artistic image from it.

The key means of building a composition is the colour plane. The artist's palette is quite diverse. Ochre, umber, greens of various shades, deep blue, red, yellow - this is not a complete list of the artist's favourite colours. Black also plays an important role, often occupying most of the canvas. The choice of the palette depends on the state and mood that control the artist at a given moment. It is thanks to its colour that the artist's works find a strong emotional response from the viewer. Indeed, when you look at Natalia Zastavna's paintings for a long time, you get the impression that you yourself turn into colour, penetrate through it.

The main feature of the artist's creative method is her interpretation of the depicted image. In the artist's works, we see not a specific object, person or animal, but something deeper behind their material embodiment. We see a visualised Jungian archetype that speaks not to the mind, but to the heart. The artist intuitively actualises archaic codes and autochthonous archetypes that live in the depths of the unconscious. The conditional background, generalised form, limited entourage and monumentality elevate the artistic images of Natalia Zastavna's works to the rank of symbols, the contemplation of which gives peace to thoughts and imagination. This becomes especially relevant in our time, when the viewer, exhausted by the emotional stress of war, finds harmony and joy in a painting.

Ivan Bilan

PhD in Art History,

Head of the Art-Module Art Association

Untitled, 2017. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 70 x 130 cm.

Untitled, 2018. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 50 x 100 cm.

Untitled, 2014. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 60 x 150 cm.

Untitled, 2013. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 60 x 80 cm.

Untitled, 2017. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 120 x 70 cm.

Untitled, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 130 x 170 cm.

Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 170 x 130 cm.

Untitled, 2012. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 130 x 110 cm.

Untitled, 2015 - Acrylic and oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm.

Untitled, 2019. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 110 x 70 cm.

Untitled, 2019. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 120 x 80 cm.

Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 100 x 70 cm.

Untitled, 2023. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 110 x 110 cm.