Medieval glass
How a Ukrainian artist found her own style
Iryna Hodunova is an accomplished artist whose works include still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and paintings on religious themes. She has also tried her hand at traditional icon-painting and illustration. Her paintings on glass have their own long and varied history, including an abstract phase.
Her paintings on glass were created swiftly, one after the other, resulting in a spectacular and stylish series of painted fairy-tales and legends set in the Middle Ages.
Hodunova’s interest in glass painting was sparked by two events: the first, when she became fascinated by Bulgaria’s famous tradition of folk glass icons, and the second, when she became acquainted with 11th-century Romanesque-style Flemish miniatures. The first event determined her technique, and the results of her artistic explorations are reminiscent of brilliant non-transparent stained glass. Here and there, however, the artist has deliberately left unpainted transparent “windows.” The art of the Romanesque miniature helped Hodunova specify the style of her future works — their restrained severity, simple-hearted attractiveness, and, most importantly, her attitude to line, color, and plot.
Interestingly, the artist began creating diptychs and triptychs rather than individual works. As a result, her canon of medieval fantasies is not that wide-ranging: Dance (probably her only “independent” work), the diptych City, the triptychs Traveling Down the River, Duel , and Bestiary , as well as a large related cycle of graphic illustrations, not on glass but following the same “tradition.”
The Duel consists of three “battles” — the actual battle, diplomatic negotiations, and a game of chess. The Bestiary tells the story of three strange beasts: a dragon, a unicorn, and a giant fish.
Hodunova’s paintings are romantic, and nothing can be done about that. After all, we are talking about swords and bass violas. But the artist’s attitude to her “medieval glass” is not restricted to romanticism. An important feature of her works is the absence of irony. If the artist is playing a game, she is doing it as seriously as the chess players in Duel .
But the most important feature of her works is their naturalness. They are like calm and detailed accounts bereft of sensationalism, even if they talk about such truly miraculous things as a battle with a dragon or the legendary way to capture a unicorn. It is more correct to say that the whole world is so beautiful that it is useless to focus one’s attention only on the giant fish, the result of the knight’s tournament (or the diplomatic negotiations or the game of chess) since they are all as interesting as the multi- towered city, or the tree with its branches tied in a tight knot, or the golden sky above this glass-painted world.
