A painting that lives on a wall and gets replaced every year

Petrykivka is founded in the lands of the Zaporozhian Host. It grew into a large free settlement, passing eleven thousand people by the 1880s, with three churches, a synagogue and twenty-nine shops. The painting itself is younger than the village, and no scholarly source places it before the nineteenth century.

The painting lived on whitewashed cottage walls, on the stove and the chimney, and on sheets of paper — the malovka — pasted up and replaced through the year. Women painted, and a woman known for it was a chepurushka (the one who dresses the house up). None of those nineteenth-century wall paintings survive; what museums hold are painted sheets from the 1910s and 1920s.

Cheap bright aniline colours reach the village at the end of the nineteenth century. They displace the plant and clay pigments and they make the painted paper sheet practical. Specialists call that early aniline range — pink, green, yellow, a little blue on white paper — the traditional palette. The plant colours belong to the stratum beneath it.

A school of decorative painting opens in Petrykivka, founded by Oleksandr Statyva, with Tetiana Pata teaching. The generation she trained — Fedir Panko, Vasyl Sokolenko and others — carried the tradition through the rest of the century. Pata received the title Honoured Master of Folk Art of the Ukrainian SSR in 1962.

Under-lacquer painting on a black ground is introduced at the Shevchenko souvenir factory in Kyiv, where Petrykivka women who had moved to the city worked, and it comes back to the village later. The black ground most people now picture was never traditional here. The historic ground is white: a limewashed wall or white paper.

The Petrykivka children's art school opens as a branch of Dnipropetrovsk Children's Art School No. 1, with O. Z. Latun as its first head and Fedir Panko and Vasyl Sokolenko among its first teachers. It later took Tetiana Pata's name.

Andrii Pikush organises the creative association «Petrykivka», with the folk masters holding it as co-owners. The Centre's own account dates it to 23 October 1991.

The children's art school becomes an independent institution, headed by Maria Pikush.

The Experimental Workshop's collective and premises merge with the association to form the Centre of Folk Art «Petrykivka». Its organiser and long-serving head is Andrii Pikush.

On 14 December the Ministry of Culture, by Order No. 1521, enters Petrykivka painting into Ukraine's National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage as element 004n.k.s. (the register's own code, transliterated).

On 29 January an exhibition of Petrykivka painting opens at the European Parliament in Brussels — more than ninety works by folk masters of the Dnipropetrovsk region, presented by an oblast delegation as part of the UNESCO campaign. That December, at its eighth session in Baku, the Committee adopts Decision 8.COM 8.29 and inscribes Petrykivka painting as file 00893: Ukraine's first element on the Representative List.

On 26 October the geographical indication No. 3121, «Petrykivka painting» (Petrykivskyi rozpys), is registered — one of only two Ukrainian folk-craft geographical indications.

Ahead of the full-scale invasion the museum's historic collection is moved somewhere safe. Reporting from the village that July found the masters still working; one of them had stopped for three months and gone back to the brush because it steadied her.

On 9 March the National Taras Shevchenko Prize goes to A. Karpets-Yermolaieva, Andrii Pikush, Maria Pikush and N. Rybak for the project «Petrykivka painting: in defence of identity» — the title the masters gave it themselves. The same year the UK Heritage Crafts Red List classifies Petrykivka decorative painting as Endangered.