Tetiana Pata’s last working student died in 2018, at ninety-six

A fixed camera over the shoulder at 4K, a macro pass on the loaded brush and the perekhidnyi mazok (the transition stroke, two pigments on one brush), and ten to thirty of her own works photographed at archival resolution in the same sitting.

Petrykivka is laid straight onto the surface with nothing drawn underneath, so the order and the pressure of the hand carry information that no still photograph of a finished work holds. Watching her lay the stroke is the way that information moves.

Every element named aloud while she makes it, in the form she actually uses. The written sources already disagree with each other: the encyclopaedia writes koshachka (the cat-fur brush) and petushinnia (a feathered flower motif), while Ukraïner recorded people in Petrykivka itself saying kotiachka and petushynnia.

A village pronunciation settles a question that two reference works cannot, and it gives the glossary on this site a source with a face attached to it.

Combing the cat, picking the undercoat out with a needle, sharpening the twig, rolling the fur onto the glued tip, binding it with thread, sealing it, wetting it so it takes its shape.

The Kharkiv regional culture centre states plainly that industrial production of cat-hair brushes does not exist and there is no point looking for them in shops. Every master makes her own, and the finest tracery has no commercial substitute. The knowledge lives in the hands of people currently in their seventies and eighties.

A life interview: her teacher, her teacher’s teacher, which workshop or factory she painted in and in which years, what she was told to change and what she refused to change, where she is living now.

The public Ukrainian roster of masters records teaching lines with no citation under them, and the dossier behind this site already found two of them in conflict. A first-person account is the only evidence that closes those questions while the person is here to give it.

The last stretch of every sitting is unscripted and belongs to her: what she wants said, what she wants corrected, who she thinks should be filmed next.

A researcher asks the questions the literature has already taught her to ask. The material that has never reached print sits on the other side of that list, and it arrives only when the recording runs past the point where the questions stop.