September 24 – October 11, 2019

Ludmila Zadorozhnaya embodies the organic combination of genetic code impulses with her own picturesque image and form. She paints as genuinely as she breathes, says, smiles.

The village of Skibintsy in Vinnytsia region, where the artist was born, is of amazing beauty: meadows, ponds, mysterious marshes. From there, the creative impulses of Ludmila Zadorozhny go to the creative present, the cosmogenic circle of her life spins. And so it is good to look mentally in your “baby cycle”.
Multifaceted relationships – teachers, the environment, friends, family – influencing the personality, orienting her in one direction or another, formed the figure of a patriotic artist who is not indifferent to the fate of Ukraine.
After the Ukrainian Printing Institute. I. Fedorov started working as a “clean graphic”, although she always loved color drawing. Her works of the 1970s (ink, pen) have been preserved. It is striking that a set of formal-compositional and technical innovations leads to certain schemes and makes them, so to speak, “supra-individual”. In pursuit of artistic independence, Ludmila Zadorozhnaya turns to the realm of relaxed and extremely colorful – in comparison with monochrome graphics – “painting”. This is how fantasy-conditional images are born, as well as poetic-realistic, concrete-sensual paintings (landscape, still life, genre). The former are based on folk decorative art, the latter attest to its own free orientation in the national and cultural heritage and acquaintance with the works of outstanding artists of modern times (Gauguin, Matisse, Van Gogh).

Often, both approaches are wonderfully combined, and images such as Winter are born. The trunks of trees here are alive, warm, as if covered with buds. On the confrontation of internal heat and external cold forms a form – the content of the picture. Two forever-woven trees are a striking composition (Crossed Destiny).
Lyudmila Zadorozhnaya seems to embody the need of the Ukrainian national consciousness to feel nature not only as a native land, but also as an ideal of beauty and goodness. She loves to draw flowers – mostly live, not cut. Still life with a single chamomile in a crystal vase – a white persona, which is admired in the same way as the queen of flowers – a rose. The venerable Bulldenegs in the composition are an exquisite blend of real and conditional, also floral, background. The concept of still life, landscape gradually matures in the artist; the shape is complicated, the image is deepening…
The drawing dominates many of the picturesque compositions of the artist. It brings the image to a virtuoso picturesque and spatial whole, the movement and statics of which are individually expressed and attractive. Lyudmila Zadorozhnaya seems to be synthesizing her preferences from previous years, becoming more bold and relaxed; her creativity, however, stands apart from the extremes of avant-garde experimentation, maintaining faithfulness to both school and the immediacy and sincerity of children’s impressions. “She climbed on a small evening in the evening, and before me the plums illuminated by the moon – the same incomprehensible plum-silver color. I take it with me all my life… ”- the artist admits.
Nature, flowers – an impulse to creative transformation, transformation of “living”, “real” into a picturesque and decorative form. Floral arrangements create a multicolor vibrant yet structured still life, beautiful in its coloristic unity, sometimes by the unexpected logic of color combination. The more the artist intensifies the color, the more flat the painting becomes and the more actively it works on the space. Color does not hide the plane, does not disturb the free flow of the image. Ludmila Zadorozhnaya’s fantasy is terrestrial, she does not invent for the sake of stunning effect. This is what creates her artistic figure – a talented, sincere, open world.
Nina Veligotska,
Candidate of Art Studies