 During the different periods of Ihor Bodnar's creative work there were Hope, Aspiration and Search that followed him. He is a great romanticist and he likes bohemia, his companions are paradoxes in Space and in Square, he knows how to listen to the Univers, how to fall and to rise, he inspires water in the well, he is glad to see an apple-tree branch...   Intensity and disturbance quickly change to unusual original thinking that excites unusual sense of gladness united with surprise. The Artist opens simply and widely in order to hide instantly behird the wall of conception and failure to express all. There is a belief that the world of the realisation of our ideas is determined by the higher force, and we are completely under the control of it and we can't change or imrove our art but only change forms. So we must agree with this belief but then we lose Aspiration. But there is another belief: the means don't exist without the ideas: deep experience compel the artist to express himself seriously, but here the Search dominates. This very viewpoint is right for the character description of Ihor Bodnar although it is comlicated by certain circumstances. He is a man who belongs to the special variety of figures - he is an Artist, a Pedagogue and a Poet. Much has been written about Ihor Bodnar, he is the participant of international shows. The importances of his distinctive romantic individuality, that can ifluence our emotions. The ability didn't come at once. And that is why the incomprehension was natural. The irregular line of rise was difficult, broken, nervous, and at last it widened and deepened the art expase of the lyrical and psychologically expressive graphic artist. Previous decades of work were marked by conflicts anf flights into oneself. In this life and work Ihor Bodnar became interested in passed experience and "childhood legends". Naturally, that in the early works the tales-recollections came into being, and there were nice for the heart moments of inspiration, when he felt himself to be the main architect of the world, that he created. The spirit of creation was peculiar to Ihor Bodnar and it was marked by its goodness and naivety, honesty and sincerity, astonishment and romanticism. Today the artist doesn't feel himself to be a lonely magician of his poetic world, where there are dreams - horses, trees-flowers and dreans-nights. He discovered the connection of his soul with the wide space of the Universe. The artist lives and creates in different circumstances, that approach him and draw his attention. He wants to adapt himself to the circumstances, feeling the importance of objective changes in our life. The periodof "Great Fortune" began after his journey to Senedge in 1988. The Artist found a successful connecion of the conditionality of formal means and the succession of deep inner experience. Something that lived in him during a long time of his painful thoughts and doubts, lightened and was expressed in the series of works. Being in Senedge he worked without complexes, he drew things that he sense. Most of the pictures show the unity of realization of his conception and the sence of inside freedom. In the works we find the light that abstracts and makes our emotions concrete by means of rythm of splashes of colours at in the works "Sanctity", "Ship of Evil", "Morning Sails". In the poetic lines he says:
The artist lived and worked among exelent graphic artists - Yaroslava Musika, Leopold Levits'kyi, Olena Kulchyts'ka, Peter Obal. He had a visual and spiritual touch with the collection of Ukrainian icons, which has been kept away from people by Vira Svientsits'ka not for one decade. Those happy meetings and connections with people and their way of thinking will not disappear but will be realized in the creations. Of course, therefore 50 years old Ihor Bodnar uses in the works "Truth", "Through Ages", "Lets Restore our Spirit" details of icon faces to deepen the embodiment of actual problems. He looks for the healing water to sprinkle his sworn brothers wounds. In the work "In the Memory of V.Stus", for example. The work "tragedy of People" displays a long genocide: poets, who passed away, killed artists and children who died from hunger and many others. The details are verified, the contours of figures are thoroughly thought out. They are like shadows behind the crosses. And the next picture "Truth" indicates the infinite search in dobts. The social significance of these works and the sharpness of their expression and even the approach to the chosen theme go aside with time.
writes I.Bodnar and advises to look for the birds of dreams and hopes among flowers and in dew. These images unite an important emotion - the fight for freedom. It's possible to say that the appearance of I.Bodnar's works widens the circle of ideas and opinions about the development of Lviv graphic art. And the artist didn't only propose an abstract-associatiove form as a problem but he expressed it as an art conception in the pictures "One night more...", "Aura", "Legend", "Black Pain". The specific language of graphic art is absent in many of his work for example, in the black-and-white compositions "Truth", "I Listen to the Univers", "Saturn". His graphic art is widened and enriched by including colour and texture into it, because the combined technique helps to feel depth and space and diversity. But it's not so important, beacuse the technique is not the main aim. The graphic artist shows how the depth of mind or human assence, the subject world can be expressed first of all as a generalized image. Ihor Bodnar changed our reality and gave it the art synthesis, where it comes forward in the new role - the majestic life of art symbols. It reaches the higher comprehension of an image. The world of artist's deeep belief appears befor us in its diversity of human relations with the Univers. The works exhibited during the last yearsshow that the author's search goes along several lines, firstly illustrations to the poems by T.Shevchenko, L.Ukrajinka, I.Franko. Then the conditional interpretation of the general situation in the poems supplemented with the reality of our visual life: huts, crosses, a thorny wreath, stripes, conours of figures and so on. They help to make the composition of the picture clearer as in "In Memory of Victims of Hunger in the Ukraine. 1933", "Long Live Heroes", "christening of Rus-Ukrain". And , at last, there are conventional associative compositions that can excite an active inside work of the spectators which is similar to the perception of music. Just in the work of ac conventional type I.Bodnar invites us to become acquainted with the impossible: that "a candle chould meet the sun", he calls us to feel the joj, because the seeds of an apple cut into two halves saw the world. He proposes us the philosophy of life - "Vertical and Horizontal of our Life" - this is the name of the work where the cross is the centre of the composition and where the way upwards becomes simply a circle. We repeat someone's way, but we make our own discoveries and mistakes. Each master makes his own Search. Somebody opens for himself an epic, but with the modern content in it, others go deep into the world of senses, and the third - ivent "new worlds". Though these aspirations which are aimed at finding out, are wide, just the same they differ from the already existing, because they are done by a particular person and at the particular time. In this approach to the solution of many works lies the depth and value of the relationchip of I.Bodnar's creation with the world of the Ukrainian graphic art.  |