Both decorative crafts and individual art equally reveal the collective psychology of society, the “folk soul” that decides that the same material (for example, wood) and the same tools (chisel) can be used to create a completely different style — for example, in Ukrainian or German or even Chinese wood carvings. And the Ukrainian “folk soul,” which manifests itself in folk or individual art, is especially charming, and it captivates even foreigners.
Mykhailo Chereshnovsky
Mykhailo Chereshnovsky was a Ukrainian-American artist, educator, and public figure.
He was born into a Lemko family in the village of Stezhnytsia (now part of Poland). In 1939, he graduated from the Krakow Academy of Plastic Arts. During the Second World War, he organized an art studio in Bolekhiv, working, in particular, on a sculptural image of Taras Shevchenko. Still, he became a member of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and was unable to focus on art. At the war’s end, he was mobilized into the Soviet army.
He was interrogated more than ten times by soviet ntelligence as a “potential enemy of the people” but miraculously managed to escape and rejoin the UPA. In 1947, he left Ukraine and lived in the DP camps of Dehendorf and Mittenwald. In 1949, he emigrated to the United States. In America, he did wood carving figures and iconostases for Ukrainian churches and created busts of Ukrainian political and cultural personalities, including Stepan Bandera, Taras Chuprynka (Roman Shukhevych), and Oleh Olzhych. Chereshnovsky’s works include the bronze Monument to Heroes at the Ukrainian Youth Association in Ellenville (USA), a series of works on the theme of Madonna, and monuments to Lesya Ukrainka, in particular, in the Park of Nations in Cleveland (USA) and Toronto (Canada). From 1973 to 1994, he headed the Ukrainian Artist’s Association in America. At the initiative of the Ukrainian Museum in New York, he conducted a carving course for children to study the traditional carvings of the Hutsul and Lemko regions. He died in 1994 in New York and was buried at St. Andrew’s Cemetery in South Bound Brook, New Jersey. Researchers of the artist’s work argue that he significantly influenced the formation of new modern foundations of Ukrainian art and returned the stylistic integrity to sculpture, which was lost in socialist realism.
