Painting Techniques

Painting is about transferring ideas, emotions, or exceptional personal views on a piece of canvas, parchment, paper, or wood under the postulate of aesthetic quality. The question of how best to use available materials and techniques is central to painting as the various approaches based on oil, watercolor, pastel sticks, or acryl colors (to name just a few) all have their specific pitfalls and can be a messy task for unexperienced beginners. This is where art schools come into play.

The «Poltava School» was founded by the famous painter Nikolai Yaroshenko (Микола Ярошенко) in the city Poltava located on the Vorskla River in central Ukraine. In his more than 200 portraits of exceptional and outstanding quality, Yaroshenko developed a very personal style that often integrates social aspects and social contexts. His paintings are, for example, in the National Art Gallery of Kiev and the Art Museums of Mykolaiv, Odessa, Poltava, and Simferopol.

Volodymyr, Maksym, and Elisa Mazur received their primary education as artists at the «National Academy of Fine Arts», a state-certified art school in Kiev, which evolved from the Poltava School tradition [Academic teachers: Fedir Krychevsky, Tetyana Yablonska, Tatyana Golembievskaya, Mykola Storozhenko, Vasili Gurin, Sergei Yakutovich, Andrii Chebykin, and Galinskaya Galina]. Thus, Vorlodymyr and Maksym Mazur primarily work with oil painting techniques. By contrast, Elisa Mazur has laid her focus in recent years on graphic techniques such as linocut, etching, woodcut, lithography, monotype, and mezzo-tinto.

Portraits of «Student» and «Mykola Ge» by Nikolai Yaroshenko (Микола Ярошенко) [1881, 1890] (oil on canvas).