Name: Yuriy Pitchuk
Age: 29
Education: Ivano-Frankivsk National Technical University of Oil and Gas, computer network engineer
Profession: Artist, muralist
Did you know? Pitchuk always paints his murals together with his wife Marta
For his art work, Yuriy Pitchuk, a painter from Ivano-Frankivsk, a city of 230,000 people located 620 kilometers west of Kyiv, nearly always has a very broad canvas. Pitchuk draws murals, pictures painted directly onto walls or other permanent surfaces.
The 29-year-old painter has already created nearly 30 murals, aiming to make Ukrainian cities more colorful. While he studied network engineering at Ivano-Frankivsk National Technical University of Oil and Gas, “I have always enjoyed the process of drawing,” Pitchuk says.
The first step Pitchuk took in his artistic career was to attend vocational courses, where he learned the basics of painting and developed the discipline to spend up to five hours at a stretch.
In 2013 a friend offered him an opportunity that has since changed his life — to paint a mural. “My friend invited me to paint a mural at his car repair shop, as he had a huge empty wall there. That’s how it all started,” Pitchuk says. Since then, painting murals has become not only his hobby, but also a way to earn money.
A third of his murals are the size of a nine-story building. His artworks can be seen in Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Khmelnytsky and in Striy, a town in Lviv Oblast.
Pitchuk says that it usually takes up to nine days to complete a mural, and since it is seasonal work, he starts painting from the middle of spring until the end of autumn.
Even though Pitchuk says painting murals on exterior walls is more difficult than painting indoors, it is extremely interesting work. “I always try to develop my technique and introduce new elements into the pictures,” Pitchuk says.
Pitchuk says one of his favorite works is a mural in Khmelnytsky where he depicted a woman in traditional Ukrainian clothes, and divided his artwork into day and night sections. It is part of a campaign he started in 2017, in which he depicts women in traditional Ukrainian dresses from the particular region in which he paints it.
“In this series of works, I want to show the diversity of our history and culture, and to help people find something native, but from a modern perspective,” Pitchuk says.
Pitchuk prefers to paint murals in industrial areas, where such murals are needed. He tries not to paint in historical parts of a city.
“There will always be people who do not like murals, as tastes always differ,” he says. “In comparison to European countries, Ukrainians do not attend museums very often, so in this regard murals can serve as masterpieces that people can see every day.”
