A tradition is a list of names, in order

The teacher the school came from

Tetiana Pata painted in Petrykivka when the work still lived on cottage walls and on paper sheets pasted up and replaced through the year. She took the practice into a classroom: from 1936 she taught at the village school of decorative painting founded by Oleksandr Statyva, and the pupils who came through her hands carried the tradition for the rest of the century.

Pata's pupil, who taught for seventy years

Vasyl Sokolenko learned from Tetiana Pata and outlasted every other pupil of hers, working into the 2010s and dying at 96. He taught at the Petrykivka children's art school alongside Fedir Panko from its opening in 1958.

Head of the Centre of Folk Art «Petrykivka»

Andrii Pikush was born in Petrykivka and learned the painting from Vasyl Sokolenko, Tetiana Pata's pupil. He worked at the Petrykivka painting factory in the early 1970s, and in 1991 he organised the creative association «Petrykivka», held by the folk masters themselves as co-owners. In 1998 that association and the experimental workshop merged into the Centre of Folk Art «Petrykivka», which he has headed since.

Shevchenko Prize laureate · head of the Pata art school from 1995

Maria Pikush learned from Vasyl Sokolenko and taught at the Petrykivka children's art school. When the school became an independent institution in 1995 she took it over as its head. With Andrii Pikush she taught their daughter Oksana at home.

Painter and teacher · murals and interiors

Oksana Pikush was born and raised in Petrykivka and learned the painting at home. Her teachers were her parents, Andrii Pikush, People's Artist of Ukraine, and Maria Pikush, Honoured Master of Folk Art, together with the master and teacher Ivan Dmytriuk. In a settlement where, as UNESCO puts it, every family has at least one practitioner, hers was the family the tradition ran through.