THE THINGS WE DO...
by Orysia Paszczak Tracz
Unraveling embroidery
PART I
Most of the time I'm an easygoing person, and few things really rankle me. What other people do in their personal and public lives may interest me to some degree, but it really is none of my business. Except for specific causes and issues, the public doings of others also are not of my concern. But when it comes to material produced by individuals in areas of my interest, and when that material leaves questions or much to be desired, well ... I restrain myself "azh prypeche."
Ukrainian folk arts are an integral part of my life. I study them, I know how to make some of them, and theoretically I know how the rest are produced. How I wish I could do all of them myself! Embroidery and pysanky are two of the folk arts I know well, and I think I have most of the published material about both. I look forward to each new book on these subjects with great anticipation, and am either thrilled or sometimes terribly disappointed.
I started collecting embroidery designs very long ago - back before the photocopier - and used graph paper and colored pencils to copy the designs. While still a high school student and working at Soyuzivka in the summers, I would go through Manager Walter Kwas's books on costume and embroidery, and use some of the designs to decorate the daily menus (by Gestetner, first drawing with a stylus on the master - yes, that long ago). Nowadays, if you come across a pattern you like, the color photocopier is a Godsend. And not only can you copy from the book or magazine, you can copy the actual embroidery directly from the shirt or pillow slip. The folks at my local copy place no longer give me strange looks when I bring in yet another piece of embroidery for copying.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I am familiar with or have almost every book on Ukrainian embroidery in circulation in the past 40 to 50 years at least. In 1991 I was given a small book (published in 1990) on Ukrainian embroidery by Xenia Kolotylo of Austria, published in Ukraine. Eagerly I looked through the pages, hoping to see new patterns. They looked fine at first, but something about them nagged at me. They seemed both familiar and strange.
A while later, I came across a larger book by the same author, published in Kyiv by the Mystetstvo publishing house in 1992. Here there are hundreds of color cross-stitch, mostly Hutsul, designs, which the author in the introduction says are her work of "designing new patterns for the traditional Hutsul ornaments." The author states that one of her greatest wishes is to popularize Ukrainian embroidery and pass it on to younger generations.
With great regret, I must say that her books and her embroidery are not what they seem. The embroidery is neither Hutsul folk embroidery nor original designs by Ms. Kolotylo. And some of it originated far from the Hutsul region (Buchach, Yavoriv, Bukovyna, the Ternopil region); some of the designs were adapted from weaving.
On almost every page, in almost every design, what I see is not an original individual pattern, but a Ukrainian folk embroidery design, now slightly altered, that I have seen someplace else. For most of them, I could specify book and page of the original published source(s) of a design (either from North America or from Ukraine).
Some are even from borders of Ukrainian greeting cards widely available in North America (e.g., p. 87, 109). I know this because in my collection I have the same designs which I cut out and saved from the cards.
Some designs are from the old Nasha Khata women's magazine (Lviv, the 1930s), some from Olena Pchilka (even earlier, with Kolotylo adding colors to Pchilka's red and black or blue patterns - and this is "Hutsul"?!), others from various Soviet Ukrainian and North American books and magazines (e.g., Nancy Ruryk et al. "Ukrainian Embroidery Stitches," Winnipeg: Ukrainian Women's Association, 1959; "Tkanyny i Vyshyvky," Kyiv: Derzh. vyd-vo obraz. myst. i muz. lit, 1960). A few designs look Middle Eastern or Oriental, or something, but certainly lack "Ukrainian-ness" (p. 67). And some are absolutely apalling, belonging nowhere (p. 105). Of course, there are obscure regional designs with which we may not be familiar, but certainly these are something else.
Many alterations involve moving a few cross-stitches here or there, creating a slightly different, now awkward design. She has also varied the traditional color schemes, to their detriment. Very often what changes is that yellow disappears, with orange and red remaining; the yellow is missed. Green sometimes appears too often, not the way it does traditionally. Some designs appear twice, in different parts of the book, with just the color scheme altered. Other designs are crudely colored in. Borders have been added, but awkwardly.
[If someone is creative and invents new designs in a Ukrainian style, it is then her or his original work. Irena Senyk did that during her years in Siberian prisons, designing absolutely new patterns based on Ukrainian embroidery (published in "Bila Aistra Liubovy," Etobicoke: Liga Ukr. Kat. Zhinok, sv. Dymytriya, 1992). These are her works - inspired by, but not, Ukrainian folk art].
I see no benefit, but only harm coming to traditional folk arts, including embroidery, if old designs with so much meaning, created over centuries, are so altered and published "for future generations" as in this new book. They are now neither folk embroidery nor original work. (Of course, we ourselves are no longer "folk"; neither are the women embroidering in Ukraine today.)
To preserve the tradition and the symbolism of true folk embroidery, we must respect it for what it was and is. If we wish to adapt it to contemporary clothing or stylized folk stage costumes, we do so retaining the original designs and color schemes. Many women "play" with the designs, adapting them to dresses and other clothing, but while the placing of the embroidery is novel, the basic design itself and its colors remain true.
I often embroider and sew dresses and blouses with embroidery that decorates the yoke, the sleeves, the neckline. I could make up an embroidery design - and it would truly be my original. But if I pore over my collection of folk patterns and select one, adapting part of it to my outfit, how in the world could I take credit for it and say it is "my" design?
(To be continued in the October 11 issue.)
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, September 27, 1998, No. 39, Vol. LXVI
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