Even taking a quick glance at Halyna Dudar's paintings an on-looker is immediately referred to the world's treasury of archaism. In her works, the artist meditatively layers versatile ingredients, combining in them the style of book illustrations with archive-, museum- and archeological elements. Halyna involves textile-, ceramic- and fresco-painting techniques in order to convey the wide range of sensations and impressions, her artistic taste and reflections; generously sharing her vibrations and impulses with the audience.

         Behind the scenes of Halyna Dudar's creative style, there can be sensed the legacy of the 1920's - 1930's Ukrainian avant-garde, with its efforts to cross-breed Modernism and Archaism of the Byzantine tradition, amplified by the usage of the national folk art of ceramics and tile painting, carving, embroidery, weaving, carpet weaving, and the West Ukrainian Easter egg-painting tradition. Halyna Dudar's artwork is somewhat reminiscent of that by Mykhailo Boychuk, whose purpose was in seeing "art in the texture of the image, not in the subject itself." The artist's sensitive intuition enables her to unmistakably select most appropriate color and tactile hints from the millennial historical and cultural heritage of the Ukrainian ethnos. Halyna "captures in the final form" (as Mykhailo Boychuk expressively defined it) the reality of every individual historical and ethnographic plot or monument, elegantly generalizing them to a recognizable symbolic image. The refined technique of "half-erased" colors and textures the artist applies, the lyrical-metaphorical rhythm with which these "memories-dreams-delusions" recur in the author's imagination allow her, on an emotional level, to transform the array of collective memory into an individual intellectual journey in time and space.

 

                                                                                                              Art critic and historian Natalka Kosmolinska