In Dec. 2020, Doodle celebrated the 120th birthday of a Ukrainian painter with the following words:
“Kateryna Bilokur, a self-taught virtuoso earned international renown for her detailed and vivid paintings, especially those featuring her signature focus on flowers. Through a courageous devotion to her craft, Bilokur overcame great adversity to earn recognition alongside the master artists of her time.
Kateryna Bilokur was born in 1900 in Bohdanivka, a village in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. She was denied a primary education and spent her days as a farm worker, but she refused to let this stand in her way. She crafted brushes out of raw materials and paints out of foods like beets and elderberries to pursue her artistic passion in her free time, with nature as her muse.
Then when she was nearly 40, her life took a fortuitous turn. Inspired by a song on the radio, Bilokur wrote a letter of admiration to the Ukrainian singer Oksana Petrusenko with an original work attached. Petrusenko was so impressed that she helped pave the way for the first exhibitions of Bilokur’s work. Over the next two decades, her unique depictions of transcendent natural beauty reached an international audience, notably earning huge praise from the Spanish master Pablo Picasso at a 1954 exhibition in Paris.
For her lifetime achievements, Bilokur was named a People’s Artist of Ukraine, the highest arts award for Ukrainian citizens.
Happy birthday to an artist who proved it’s never too late to blossom into your potential.”
Pablo Picasso in Ukrainian embroidered shirt >
