About · who runs this
Petrikivka keeps one tradition in public: the history with a source under every line, the masters with their own consent, the technique as it is actually taught, and paid work routed to the people who paint. It is built with Oksana Pikush — born in Petrykivka, taught at her parents’ table, and the fourth name in the handover this site records.
Who
Oksana Pikush was born and raised in Petrykivka and learned the painting at home. Her teachers were her parents and the master Ivan Dmytriuk. Her father, Andrii Pikush, is a People’s Artist of Ukraine and a laureate of the National Taras Shevchenko Prize of 2025; he organised the masters’ association in 1991 that merged into the Centre of Folk Art «Petrykivka» in 1998, and he has headed the Centre since. Her mother, Maria Pikush, is an Honoured Master of Folk Art.
She works in the Greater Toronto Area. She paints interiors and murals, teaches children and adults across the region, and hands out brushes carried over from Petrykivka at every class she runs. A six-week course she taught at the St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto is the longest of them so far, and she sings with the Toronto choir Vesnivka, which is the other half of how the village travels with her.
Behind her the line runs back through Vasyl Sokolenko, who taught her father and worked until he died at 96, to Tetiana Pata, who taught the first formal class in the village. Four names, each with a page here and a source under every title.
The painting itself is published and open. The gallery holds 39 plates, 19 of them paintings on white paper, with the brushes, the painted objects, the village and the masters themselves standing around them. Every plate carries the credit its licence requires and a link to the file it came from.
Three of them sit below. Two carry the painter’s name because the source gave it; the third states in its register line that the hand is unnamed, and that line changes the day the master or the family who holds the work says so and sends the evidence.
Porcelain vase
Painted by Marfa Tymchenko
Overglaze painting on porcelain, made at the Kyiv experimental ceramic-art factory in the second half of the twentieth century.
Chest, «Blue flowers»
Painted by Nataliia Statyva-Zharko
A painted wooden chest in a cool blue range, away from the red-and-gold the factory made familiar.
Rose vazon on white
The vertical vazon in its plainest form, on the historic white ground.
Six rules
These govern what goes on a page and what stays off it. They are here so a master, a museum or a buyer can hold us to them by name.
A statement about history, transmission, dates, titles or institutions is traceable to a stored source record, and the link sits on the page beside the claim. A sentence that cannot be sourced is cut or rewritten until it can be. Figures we modelled ourselves are marked as models, and a fact we are still chasing is named in plain words inside the sentence that needs it, so every reader can see what is missing and hold the page to it.
A worked example sits inside this project. A festival team described Andrii Pikush as the man who created and toured a 250-work exhibition that travelled fifty countries and led to the UNESCO inscription. Contemporary reporting says something narrower: the exhibition that opened at the European Parliament in Brussels did so on the evening of 29 January 2013, it showed more than ninety works by folk masters of the Dnipropetrovsk region, and an oblast delegation presented it. Further showings in Belgium and France were planned. The inscription followed that December in Baku.
His profile carries the sourced version, and the larger claim stays off the site in both languages until the Centre produces a catalogue or a list of venues that settles it. This row is where the difference is recorded.
Wikipedia · Centre of Folk Art «Petrykivka» ↗Lists of what every flower supposedly means circulate widely and rarely carry a source. Where this site gives a meaning, it names whose reading it is. The UNESCO file itself records examples — birds standing for light, harmony and happiness, the rooster for fire and spiritual awakening — and even those are given here as documented readings held by a community, with the context they came from.
UNESCO · element 00893 ↗Names are transliterated from Ukrainian using the national standard, so the village is Petrykivka and the masters are Andrii Pikush, Tetiana Pata and Vasyl Sokolenko. Craft terms keep their Ukrainian sound in the same transliteration, set in italics, and carry an English gloss the first time they appear on a page: pupianok (the bud), kucheriavka (the curl), petushynnia (a feathered flower motif).
An image of a painting goes up with the painter named, the rightsholder recorded and the permission on file: what it covers, where it may appear and for how long. An image that arrives without that record stays off the site, however good it looks. The same applies to photographs of people, including children.
The gallery is built on that record: 39 plates, each one carrying its credit, its licence and a link back to the file it came from. Where the source names the painter, the painter’s name leads the register line. Where the source leaves the hand unnamed, the plate says so in those words, and the name goes on the day a master or a family claims the work and sends what proves it.
The register, plate by plate →The photographs here of brushes, pigments, paper, limewash and hands were generated as interpretations for this site, and every caption says so in the same words. None of them shows a master’s painting, and none of them will ever be sold, licensed or offered as one. Ornament published on this platform is the work of a named author.
Rule 01, in pictures
20 plates of the register itself — paper, wood, porcelain, a village wall and the yard of the factory. Every one of them opens on a file with a photographer, a licence and a date attached, and the gallery prints all three under the picture.
The floor
Three commitments, written concretely enough that you can catch us breaking them.
Sell an imitation as the real thing
The record travels with the object
A work offered here is traced to the person who painted it, with materials, date and rights written down before it is listed. A printed or machine-made image is labelled as what it is, on its own page, in the same type as everything else around it.
List a master who has not agreed
Consent first, in writing, and revocable
A profile goes up when the master, or the family holding the rights, agrees in writing and supplies what should appear. Nobody arrives here from a search result. A master can ask for their page to come down at any time, and it comes down without a reason being required.
Let a sponsor’s name cover the painter’s
The credit line belongs to the hand
Funders are named plainly on the page their money paid for, with the amount and the purpose. The painter’s name stays first on the work, in the caption and in the file that carries it. Which sponsors are accepted at all is settled by an artists’ council: 3 practising masters who read the register and rule on any name attached to it. The council sits for the first time once the first 10 masters are published, and its decision on a sponsor is final.
Consent, in faces
Each of these photographs arrived with the name of the person who took it, a free licence and a link to the file. A profile page follows on the day the master, or the family holding the rights, sends written permission and says what belongs on it.
Vasyl Sokolenko
Pata's pupil and the teacher of Andrii and Maria Pikush, photographed in 2016, two years before his death at 96.
Volodymyr Hlushchenko
Another of Sokolenko's pupils, in his workshop.
Hanna Samarska
Honoured Master of Folk Art of Ukraine.
Tetiana Harkava
Honoured Master and the author of the fullest illustrated manual of the painting.
Viktoriia Tymoshenko
At work in the studio.
Valentyna Nosenko
A master of the painting with her work.
Valentyna Karpets-Yermolaieva
Teaching the «Sun in the palm» circle; in 2025 a Shevchenko Prize laureate alongside Andrii and Maria Pikush.
The register, off paper
The painting travels on whatever the household already owns, and the state put it on its postage and its currency. These plates carry their credit and their licence the same way every other picture here does.
Medallions
Small painted medallions laid on an embroidered cloth.
Painted boards on a market stall
Boards painted in the traditional manner, offered at a craft stall.
Kitchen boards, Poltava 2025
Everyday objects still carrying the painting, photographed in 2025.
Painted Christmas baubles
The painting on a seasonal object, which is how most households meet it today.
A figured board and medallions
Work in the traditional manner on small everyday forms.
Postage stamps in honour of Tetiana Pata
Ukrposhta, 2000. A se-tenant honouring the teacher the school came from.
Commemorative coin, obverse
National Bank of Ukraine, «Petrykivka painting», 2016.
Commemorative coin, reverse
National Bank of Ukraine, «Petrykivka painting», 2016.
Contact
One address carries all of it: a correction to a page, a request to be listed, a request to be taken down, a question about the rights to an image, a class, a commission, or a recording for the archive.
A correction that names the page and the source you hold gets a reply within 3 days and a dated note on the page itself, so the change is visible to the next reader.
Petrikivka is run by Oksana Pikush as a private project, based in the Greater Toronto Area. It is not yet an incorporated body and it holds no charitable registration, so a gift made here is a gift and carries no tax receipt.