Candlestick. 1970-th yrs. Ceramics.
(page 12-17). The art of this famous folk art master (1905 — 2000) is a very convincing example of folk art wealth, its vitality, great potential of development as well as transformation into forms that hadn't existed till that time. In this issue of the magazine four authors tell the story about Oleksandr Ganzha. They are Oleksandra Danchenko, a Candidate of Arts, Stepan Gamha, the potter's son, a painter and a tapestry master, Volodymyr Tytarenko, an Art Expert and a countryman of the potter, Otes Dorichenko, a poet and a painter. We hope that along with the master's art works presented in the magazine, our readers will discover this great talent of a genius from the village of Zhornyshcha, that has been developed in very complicated conditions. In spite of that the master possessed an every day need to create, showing his magic and naive perception of the world. Oleksandra Danchenko tells about difficult formation of the master and at the beginning not very successful skills of managing the potter's wheel. A lot of time had to pass before a clot of his life impressions and thoughts could be transferred into the art of intimate images. So that in the soul of the ancestral potter a great original artist could be born. Oleksandr created his first ceramic pieces from white clay, manually, adding a lot of quartz sand, not using the potter's wheel. They seem to be made from stone, because their surface is rough. His composition technique is shown in "My Wife and I" twin group composition, in which the main size has been made with the help of the potter's wheel and hands have been made in the shape of a loop. Since then Ganzha had refused from a sculpture-monolith. The main character of his art works is a man. The source for his art was life. In peculiar series of sculptures, one can notice that the artist tried to reproduce the very essence of a man, his spirituality, but not ist formal resemblance. Among all Oleksandr's art works animalistic sculptures, very i different in terms of a composition, make a great part work. These are both domestic animals and some unknown magical animals as well as some dishes in the shape of lions.