Nadiya BABENKO
Carpet "Spring holiday". 220 õ 330.
I’d cover all my native Ukraine with carpets
I’d cover all my native Ukraine with carpets – this desire followed Nadiya Babenko all her life. Her talent was highly acknowledged – it was she who was trusted to make a project of the carpet for presenting the UNO when Ukraine became the member of this organization. It was A tree of Life carpet made by the masters from Reshetylivka under N. Babenko’s supervision. Nowadays the carpet still represents our country: the inscription under it says: “Gift of Ukraine – 1970”. Nadiya was born in September 1926 in the village Veresochi (Chernihiv region). She was educated in the Art College in Krolevtsi, then worked in Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) and after as an instructor in making carpets in Reshetylivka (Poltava region). She “started her own factory in painting carpets” and decided to weave her ideas. Art and industrial cooperative and the art items factory in Reshetylivka, which used to be the former Union carpet center, are the places where majority of Nadiya Nestorivna’s works were created. There at Reshetylivka factory she started a kind of “pedagogical chair” and brought up a number of her followers. Her first pupil is her son Oleksandr Babenko, a famous carpet master. The author of the article is Vasyl Shcherbak.