Burnt Tree
For two years I painted the scenery as if I was walking in a circle. Firstly- almost without colour, later- 'disappearing' scenery-delusion. In my drawings on paper I approached to the scenery in a way as owing to the frequent increase it became 'transparent' and went through me and vice versa. At last, having finished work with 'Burned Tree' I realized that I had painted the 'gap'. The process of depictiion scenery ,in actual fact, was the process of the 'deduction' scenery by itself for all this time. At that time I was thinking about the emptiness of lines on the zinc boards in Shevchenko's etchings, the emptiness without present time, with the past(paint) and the future(imprint on paper).
If to apply to the chronology of gradual removals, firstly, I limited the pallette leaving almost black and white paints for myself, and exactly limited nature in the colour made the beautiful, hot summer landscape remote and 'icy'. Then, exhausting the paint to the transparency through practically full removal the dense matter of painting I almost carried on the drawing on canvas and the drawings on paper. Approach or peeping 'inside' the landscape in the drawings on paper removed the subject of consideration- the landscape by itself, and betwween the canvases of 'Burnt Tree' I left the empty space that became the final defenition of the gap.
The real burnt tree is also a cavity, the empty form or free form (for the future paint?). Or so-called hardening reminiscences about the unattainable landscape-paradise. The beautiful fragile coal form, the empty and subject to the inevitable destruction element of the landscape.
For me 'Burnt Tree' has become something like the hiding-place for the landscape-delusion, fragile world that escapes all the time or the real landscape that personifies the own unreality if it is located behind the horizon, the landscape which is very usual and well-known that potentially is the paradise.
Exactly the tiredness of the permanent escape is this coal pain which is saved in the shape of a tree, pain as an empty form that desires the execution.
In some drawings and in the planes of 'Burnt Tree' I have used the coal as a material for drawing. The landscape looks like painted by itself. Or I was painting the landscape by the landscape. The circle has locked in a such way.
(Volodymyr Budnykov)