An artist Maria Sinjakova (1890) is an avant-gardist and neo-primitivist who created
few similar portraits “Venus’” with pastoral narrative scenes around them, modeled
on medieval icons of saints with hagiographies.
Maria was passionate about folk art. She called peasant women «Gauguins with
tattered heels». That’s why she chose the Ukrainian primitive art as her inspiration.
Her fate was tragic although still had a happy ending.
I portrayed Maria in her style.
So, first scene: Maria had a happy childhood with her four sisters and four brothers
In Krasna Polyana in Kharkiv area.
The second one: marriage and travel around the Europe and Central Asia, which
introduced Maria to avant-garde flows of art.
The third one: Sinjakova sisters with futurists and avant-gardists in Krasna Polyana,
in family estate. Bohemian clique was swimming naked. According to Maria's
stories, during such events, she drew from nature. Girls and goats and nature. Men
rarely undressed because they considered themselves not attractive enough, and
they fell in love with the Sinyakov sisters and dedicated poems to them. "Blue
Shackles" is a collection of Khlebnikov's poems specifically about the Sinyakov
sisters.
The fourth scene is based on Maria's work "War" about World War I. Such,
unfortunately, are familiar scenes of rape and murder. Maria wrote: "Undress, don't
fight." And there was half a century before the hippie movement and their "make
love, not war".
Scene five - moving to Moscow and expelling Sinyakova from the Union of Artists
"for standing in front of Western art." Maria was still engaged in book illustration for
some time, without color, and then she was forbidden to do that too, and she
painted Christmas tree toys. She lived in terrible poverty.
The last scene is her personal exhibition in Kyiv at the end of her life. Researchers of
futurist poets found Sinyakova to talk about their shared past. That's how they saw
her works, and the Kyiv art critic Dmytro Gorbachev arranged for her to be
exhibited, albeit in the Kyiv Union of Writers, and not in a solid museum. Maria had
to sell the painting to her sister in order to buy a ticket for the Moscow-Kyiv train.
But after that, worldwide fame came to Maria, and collectors from all over the
world began to come to her cell in the attic, where she lived.