ESSAY: Onyshkewych, "the omnivoyant traveler" (11/03/02)

ESSAY: Onyshkewych, "the omnivoyant traveler"

The following essay was penned by Philip Eliasoph, professor of art history at Fairfield University, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibit "From Here to There" at the Southport Harbor Gallery.

In his journeys between here and there, Zenowij (better known as Zenko) Onyshkewych is never a tourist but always the omnivoyant traveler. Still vibrant after 50 years of artistic production, he continues to confront the unsurpassed truths of nature. This exhibition presents ample evidence of an ongoing commitment to the 19th century's invention of painting en plein air. But we are not to obligingly expect the Impressionist's sparkling palette and flower beds of a midday in June in the 1880s. Tempered by a gutsy realism indelibly etched from his boyhood as an eyewitness to [World War II] Zenko eschews loveliness by opting for dramatic intensity.

Resisting frivolity or artifice, his paintings are attempts at gauging atmospheric turbulences of sky, sea and land. At his best, Zenko might even achieve Baudelaire's challenge to capture "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent." Painterly but precise, freely gesturing with brush and wash while retaining our retinal gaze, the Barbizon mood resurfaces on Zenko's canvases. It was this pre-Impressionist generation of the 1840s-1860s which realized that nature could never be static or fixed. They painted the countryside and marine scenes with a stubborn reliance upon a grainy chiaroscuro of light and weather conditions. The blinding, retinal dance of dissolved, scientifically charged color was to be the gift of Impressionism.

The next time you are in New York or Boston take a good look at those wonderful examples in the museum collections by Daubigny, Millet, Rousseau, Corot, or even the Dutchman, J.B. Jongkind. These are the best models informing our appreciation of Zenko's work. Manipulating his monochromatic grays and silver-tinted blues, he is more an apt interpreter of Boudin than a slavish mimic of Monet. Art history lessons can be instructive only to a certain point. I have stood beside so many friends and admirers whose instinctual responses to a Zenko canvas is: "Man, this guy really knows how to paint!"

I like to imagine Zenko as an archetypal weatherbeaten, old salt fighting a gale in a Homer painting. Foraging out into nature's primordial embrace, he opens his paint box atop icy perches in Switzerland, sets up his easel on rocky ledges along the mighty Hudson River, and putters around the Connecticut shoreline in a derelict, dented dory. Ready to sleep on straw beds in alpine huts, drive around in the most characteristically dilapidated vehicles still registered in Fairfield County, and his willingness to withstand any physical discomfort or indignity tells us much about his passion for painting. A relentless desire to find the right spot to paint transforms his travels into Gandhi-like trials of self-denial.

We were conversing recently about a charming stretch of road in that earthly paradise of Tuscany, a hairpin set of turns along vine-clad hills and sweeping cypresses, between Volterra and San Gimignano. My sensorial memory of that summer day was enhanced by a sumptuously presented five-course luncheon my wife and I feasted on at a Michelin Guide recommended villa. Zenko's experience was far more modest. He is the only American I know who can still boast about the mythic "Europe on $5 a day" of the 1950s. Remarkably, I know he manages to survive on a budget of less than $25 daily, equivalent to what I normally pay for a bottle of Brunello during lunch. Miraculously this Social Security-aged recipient, still sleeps in drafty convents, packs picnic lunches of stale bread, hard cheese or sardine cans, and survives like a wandering hermit saint in the wilderness as a latter-day Sassetta painting.

This selection of paintings reflect an honesty, genuineness and joyous inspiration for life that defines Zenko. Within that aureole of morning rays on a snowy ridge in Switzerland or the last glint of sunset at Compo Beach, we discover the itinerant artist at his true home. Disenchanted or discomforted as I find myself, and I suspect other kindred spirits, with the current 'state of the art world,' we all can anticipate the newly rolled-up canvases and small studies Zenko promises to bring back from future travels.

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