Confession: I am obsessed with folk art. And being Russian, I can’t believe I just discovered Maria Primachenko. Raw Vision Magazine described her best and I’m not going to try to outword them, so here is a quote from the magazine:

“This miracle of colour and invention had her bast shoes planted firmly on the soil of her native land. Maria Aksentievna Primachenko (1908–1997) was a Ukrainian peasant. Her astonishingly fertile picture plane was located in the flat limitless horizon of the Ukrainian steppe.

Primachenko’s mother and grandmother were highly skilled embroiderers and she absorbed the inter-generational Slavic tradition of needlework, of which Ukrainian embroidery is a superlative example. It encodes an ancient symbolism, fusing both pagan and Christian, where flower heads morph into eternal sun wheels, birds become messengers of peace, horses protect from the evil eye. This inherited world of signs would saturate Maria’s later work. When we encounter these forms and symbols on the decorated pottery of the adult artist, the initial impression is one of timelessness. Are they Bronze Age? Contemporary?

Primachenko lived her life in the village of Bolotnya in the Kiev region. She contracted polio as a child. Her already empathetic character became heightened into a profound sense of universality that in earlier times might have been seen as almost pantheistic. In the Ukraine of the immediate post-Revolutionary period this would, of necessity, find more nuanced modes of expression.”

Discovering this gem of an artist took me down a wormhole trying to find any product that might have her art on it. I found these pillows that were made for Ikea but were no longer available! What a shame!

The only things I found that I could buy for my home were some small postcards and I bought the ones shown below. I ordered these from someone from Estonia on Etsy hoping I can turn them into posters. If you know of anywhere I could buy her pillows or anything else with her work on it, even a book, please let me know!

-Claudia Brown