The Living Archive · at its start
Vasyl Sokolenko studied composition under Pata and graduated in 1941, the year the village school closed with the war. He was chief artist of the Petrykivka painting factory for two decades, and he taught Andrii Pikush and Maria Pikush. He died on 26 April 2018, the last of Pata’s direct students still active into the 2010s. The people he taught hold the line now, and they are in their seventies and eighties.
Status · 16 September 2026
Masters recorded so far: 0. What stands today is a written shooting protocol, a consent form covering archive, publication, education and licensing, a costed plan for the first cohort, and a family inside the tradition who can make the introductions that decide whether a first visit works.
Petrykivka is a settlement of under four thousand people where a botched first sitting would be common knowledge by evening. The plan puts the first three recordings with a master the Pikush family has known for years, and everything after that depends on how those three go.
The sitting
One visit per master, in her own workshop or wherever she has moved to, following the same protocol every time so that one recording can be read against the next.
A fixed camera over the shoulder at 4K, a macro pass on the loaded brush and the перехідний мазок, and ten to thirty of her own works photographed at archival resolution in the same sitting.
Petrykivka is laid straight onto the surface with nothing drawn underneath, so the order and the pressure of the hand carry information that no still photograph of a finished work holds. Watching her lay the stroke is the way that information moves.
Every element named aloud while she makes it, in the form she actually uses. The written sources already disagree with each other: the encyclopaedia writes кошачка and петушіння, while Ukraïner recorded people in Petrykivka itself saying котячка and петушиння.
A village pronunciation settles a question that two reference works cannot, and it gives the glossary on this site a source with a face attached to it.
Combing the cat, picking the undercoat out with a needle, sharpening the twig, rolling the fur onto the glued tip, binding it with thread, sealing it, wetting it so it takes its shape.
The Kharkiv regional culture centre states plainly that industrial production of cat-hair brushes does not exist and there is no point looking for them in shops. Every master makes her own, and the finest tracery has no commercial substitute. The knowledge lives in the hands of people currently in their seventies and eighties.
cultura.kh.ua ↗A life interview: her teacher, her teacher’s teacher, which workshop or factory she painted in and in which years, what she was told to change and what she refused to change, where she is living now.
The public Ukrainian roster of masters records teaching lines with no citation under them, and the dossier behind this site already found two of them in conflict. A first-person account is the only evidence that closes those questions while the person is here to give it.
The public roster ↗The last stretch of every sitting is unscripted and belongs to her: what she wants said, what she wants corrected, who she thinks should be filmed next.
A researcher asks the questions the literature has already taught her to ask. The material that has never reached print sits on the other side of that list, and it arrives only when the recording runs past the point where the questions stop.
Custody
The rules below are fixed before the first camera is switched on, because a master decides whether to sit down on the strength of them.
The interview is conducted and archived in Ukrainian, and the Ukrainian transcript is the version of reference. English subtitles and a translated transcript are made from it and marked as translations, so a researcher can always go back to what she said.
One signed agreement per person, covering archive, publication, education and licensing, revocable by her, with model-training rights excluded by default. Her name travels with every frame and every still, permanently.
Institutional and educational access at no charge, with attribution required and the consent terms attached to the file. Commercial licensing goes back through the master, and the terms for it sit on this page where anyone can read them.
This platform, a Ukrainian institution, and an offshore mirror in a second jurisdiction, in a format museums and Europeana can read. A recording that exists on one shelf in one oblast is one bad night from a permanent gap.
Why now
Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture counted 1,453 damaged heritage monuments and 2,286 damaged cultural infrastructure objects as of 25 April 2025, 425 of them destroyed outright, including 53 heritage sites in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Damage to intangible heritage goes into no register in the country, and it is the kind of loss that leaves nothing to photograph afterwards.
Ukraine’s own nomination for element 00893 lists, among its proposed safeguarding measures, activities to unify the archives and audiovisual funds of Petrykivka painting and to establish a database of ethnographic, art and documentary materials. The element was inscribed on 5 December 2013. That archive is still owed.
UNESCO element 00893 ↗The settlement council’s figure for 2025. In 1886 the same place counted 11,668 people across 1,768 yards, with three churches, a synagogue and twenty-nine shops; the 2001 census found 4,913. The tradition is carried by a settlement that has lost two-thirds of the people it had when the wall painting was ordinary.
Population record ↗Thirty-eight masters on the public Ukrainian roster have no recorded death year, and twenty-eight of those were born before 1956, which makes them seventy or over in 2026. Vasyl Sokolenko was ninety-six when he died. Every month without a sitting removes names from that number for good.
Ukrinform, 2018 ↗Dnipropetrovsk oblast has evacuated roughly thirty-five thousand museum objects to safer places inside the oblast and to western Ukraine, reported by the regional military administration on 6 May 2026. The reporting names no institution in Petrykivka, so whether the painting collections moved is a question for the museum itself — [PETRYKIVKA MUSEUM: EVACUATION STATUS TO CONFIRM].
Glavcom, 06.05.2026 ↗Front-line facts move. The oblast figures above are dated where they were published, and they are re-checked against the oblast military administration before each funding submission.
Take part
Each of these reaches a person, and each gets an answer with the next step written out in it.
A master, or a family holding the rights
Write with the master’s name, where she is now, and who taught her. The consent form and the full shooting protocol come back before anything is agreed, in Ukrainian, and she can read them with her own family and refuse any part of them. Masters aged seventy and over are scheduled first.
A funder, a foundation or a patron
One sitting is modelled at €900–€1,600 all-in: the fee to the master, the videographer, travel, transcription, translation, editing and storage. That range is a working estimate and has never been tested against a real shoot — [PER-MASTER COST TO CONFIRM AFTER THE FIRST THREE]. The accounting for every funded sitting is published, naming who paid and who was recorded.
A museum, school, university or archive
Access for teaching, exhibition and scholarship costs nothing, with attribution required and each master’s consent terms attached to the file. An institution willing to hold a deposit copy is the most useful letter this page can receive: the second and third copies are still open — [DEPOSIT PARTNERS TO CONFIRM].