Paints are Like a Life

There are people meeting with which gives you a joy just like a sunny day gives you a light and warmth. And it’s not an easy task to understand the reason for this joy, although you clearly feel joy, and light, and warmth.

Peter Zakharovich Yemets is the amateur artist. He did not graduate from a special educational institution in which he would be taught to draw, to understand the laws of beauty and fine art. The title of the highest creative qualification artist was given to him solely for love, hard work and an unquenchable desire to draw, draw, and draw.

It cannot be said that Yemets had no teachers, admirers, or critics. Everything was, and is, like it was for every artist.

When he was a child, he painted his peer friend who lived next door. That little boy turned out to be so similar and likable that Petya liked the portrait very much, even laughed with joy. So he gave the picture to his ‘hero’ right away. Many years have passed since then, but today, he also gives people his paintings easily and joyfully.

Yemets considers Stepan Illarionovich Vovk, the chairman of a collective farm in his native village, Bolshaya Vovnyanka, Tarashchansky district, to be his first mentor.

A man with gentle and generous soul, he caressed the boy, who grew up without a father, supported his desire to draw. No, he could not teach Petya to work with a pencil or brush, but he taught to see the world as beautiful and harmonious, generous and complex thing. As a result, the boy began to decorate everything he was asked to decorate in the village; the locals considered him their rural artist.

And when Peter grew up he got in the tractor and plowed as skillfully as his fellow villagers. And he drew, drew, drew.

When an art-design workshop was organized in Volodarka, he finally made a choice: now drawing had become his profession.

Peter Zakharovich with his family moved to Volodarka. With his own hands, with love, he built a house. ‘You will recognize it immediately; there is no similar houses in Volodarka,’ people told me when I asked for directions to the Yemets’. The original layout, not to mention the decoration of the house, while a reference point to the convenience, functionality of housing are also his work. ‘Imagine, these wide doors can be opened so that you get one big room, like in a palace - light, spacious,’ he says happily.

He created many paintings, but did not turn his home into an art gallery. Only one of his work, mallow, is on the wall. ‘It’s very difficult to draw them. This flower immediately loses its beauty if it is picked. It’s not created for a bouquet at all... ‘, - says Yemets. In the courtyard he grows mallows, chamomiles, majors, dahlias, marigolds, and asters - all the flowers that can be found in the village courtyard. But it is not only the riot of colors that this yard strikes you with. It rather resembles a kind of meadow. It was as if no one sowed flowers, but they grew up: every flower chose the place to show off and grew up there.

So, there is no the art gallery here. To see the work of Peter Zakharovich, we had to go upstairs with the owners to a spacious attic. I have not seen a cozier place for a long time. Here are dried herbs: St. John’s wort, chamomile, mint. There is a small mound of hay, fragrant, just take and brew the tea. And the paintings are stacked at the roof racks. Most of them are in frames made by the skillful hands of Yemets.

We are looking at the pictures. Here are the sketches, many sketches brought by him from Transcarpathia. Peter Zakharovich calls this land a second homeland, often goes there. And Transcarpathia became his motherland because of his father, Zakhar Yemets, who died in 1944, a few months before the birth of Peter.

But many years passed, and another Zakhar Yemets was born. He did not need much time to choose the name of his son: one name, the cherished one was the most precious for him since childhood. Giving his son the name of his father, Peter Zakharovich did not know that in a few years his dream would still be fulfilled and he would finally be able to bow to his father’s grave, because one day he would receive a long-awaited letter from red rangers from the Verkhovinsky district of Ivano-Frankovsk region.

The exhibitions of his works, as a rule, are organized in honor of May 9, because the best of his creations are dedicated to Holy Victory.

Since he realized his orphanhood and the joy of life, for the sake of which his father died high in the mountains, Peter Zakharovich always returns to this topic; he does not leave the desire to comprehend this page of the life of the Soviet people, which is full of tragedy and heroism.

Here is a rural boy fishing, and real excitement of a fisherman is on his face. He sat down with a fishing tackle... on the wing of a plane with a fascist swastika that had fallen into the reach of a river, shot with our anti-aircraft guns.

And here, on the canvas entitled “On Ivan Kupala” (Ivan Kupala is the national holiday of the Eastern Slavs, dedicated to the summer solstice and the highest flowering of nature. It is celebrated on June 24 – transl.), a girl with a wreath is depicted, smiling at some of her innermost thoughts. Here, next to her, is her automatic gun, and the girl wears pretty worn tunic. Far on the other side of the river one can see the enemy cannons...

‘On Ivan Kupala? And where is the night?’

‘At night she would not go ashore. During the daylight, the guns for the both sides did not shoot...’

Here is another picture... It happened to his relatives. The wedding went from one area of our region to another. On the way they stopped in a picturesque place. Suddenly, someone noticed a grave with a red star.

The bride immediately suggested:

‘Let’s lay flowers here.’

They came up. Suddenly the bride’s face became whiter than her veil. Her father’s name was carved on the grave. They had been looking for so long, they wrote everywhere and here is such a meeting.

The thoughts about war carrying sorrow are sad, but the pictures tell about the joy of the victory of life over death. By the way, the only color that is absent in the Yemets’ palette is black. It’s completely absent. Such paint does not stick to his brush. And his favorite colors are blue, pink, purple. They manage to convey any mood...

Peter Zakharovich is a man rich in friends. Near the place where he rested (and drew a lot, of course) runs the gas pipeline Urengoy - Pomary - Uzhgorod. He chose an interesting place, located there with the easel. Suddenly the car stopped to rest, and people, seemingly builders, approached him. The man, apparently, the same age as Yemets, addressed him with a noticeable accent, became interested in his work. Peter Zakharovich spoke in conversation that his father was buried here, nearby... It turned out that Yemets’ interlocutor was German, and his father also died in that war... But he couldn’t find his father’s grave...

‘It’s easier for me, I can go to my father...’ says Peter Zakharovich. ‘There is nothing worse and more stupid than war.’

It seems that nothing but his canvases can talk about Volodarka better. Here is the same corner, near the school. The artist portrayed it in the spring, when greens were luxuriously abundant, and in winter, when the first snow fell... And this place becomes more memorable and special to you. In addition, the residents of Volodarka are sure that it is their river Ros that is the most beautiful. When you look at the paintings of Peter Yemets you are convinced of this.

Nina Alekseevna, the wife of Peter Zakharovich, also has a talent for drawing therefore she helps her husband in many ways and, perhaps, understands his paintings like no one else.

‘Most of all he likes to draw from life,’ she says. (Is this why I saw mallows in the house... Do you remember ‘This is a flower that cannot be plucked, it will wither right away’?).

So, I cannot clearly separate what Peter Zakharovich Yemets lives with and what he draws. Maybe that’s why the meeting with him gave me such warmth and light? It is interesting for him to see everything in life, in action. Filled with love and beauty, he is connected with his roots to his native land, like the mallow that cannot live without a garden in which it blossomed.

‘Do you know that there are 40 types of chamomile, and only one of them has healing properties? Which one of these?’ he asked, seeing me on a bench in his garden. And at the same time he was not surprised, did not ask why this stranger to him was sitting there. He then came by bike from the meadows with an armful of daisies, paints and an easel, and immediately began to talk about the beauty of the day fading away already.

His daughter, Natalia, also draws. But the father is in no hurry to pass on his secrets and his own vision of the world. Let her draw, see in her own way, let her, like her father, generously distribute her drawings. Only he would very much like his daughter to get a special education, the one he never managed to get.

And his son Zakhar likes to deal with equipment more or to stay on the river with a fishing rod. He is a recognized authority among the guys on their street. He assembled, for example, a bicycle from scrap metal, so that everyone would ride. Morning begins with someone calling loudly Zakhar under the window. Peter Zakharovich is happy about such generosity of his children, as an artist and as a person.

Last year, in the House of Political Education of the Kiev Regional Committee and the city committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, eleven of his paintings were exhibited for the first time. The success of the exhibition inspired. Now he has another idea: to create a cycle of pictures about bread that is close and dear to him.

L. Pogrebnaya.

Kiev.

Molodaya Gvardia Newspaper, August 1983.