PARSIPPANY, N.J – Zenowij Onyshkewych, a prolific Ukrainian American artist, whose oeuvre includes a wide range of media, died on December 30, 2018 at the age of 89.
In 2015-2016, The Ukrainian Museum presented “Sixty Years an Artist: A Retrospective Exhibition of Works by Zenowij Onyshkewych.” (The exhibit opened on September 30, 2015, and was on view through January 17, 2016.) The exhibit showcased his landscapes, but also included portraits and caricatures executed in oils, watercolors, and ink or pencil.
The Ukrainian Museum’s article announcing the exhibit (published in The Ukrainian Weekly on October 4, 2015) noted: “An assessment of Mr. Onyshkewych’s creative heritage is an evolutionary consequence of a complex personal history – that of a Ukrainian immigrant absorbing the European painting tradition through a strong American lens. Mr. Onyshkewych himself is a vivid embodiment of the impact that the cruelty of the 20th century, with its displacements, wars, ruptures and losses, has had on human fate.”
Mr. Onyshkewych’s work is found among prestigious American and international collections, including the Vatican, where he painted a life-size portrait of Pope Paul VI commissioned by Patriarch Josyf Slipyi for the official papal residence. Mr. Onyshkewych’s caricatures and other drawings, paintings and editorial illustrations appeared in The New York Times, The National Observer, Reader’s Digest, as well as Svoboda, and publications for St. Martin’s Press, McGraw Hill and Random House, just to name a few. He was also an adjunct professor of drawing and painting at Fairfield University for 24 years.
Mr. Onyshkewych was born in Lviv, Ukraine, on December 8, 1929. In 1944, his family and he were forced from their home and into a German work camp in Vienna. In 1946, the U.S. Army transported the family to a displaced persons camp in Munich, where Zenowij completed high school and began to study art. The family entered the United States in 1949, settling in Queens.
Mr. Onyshkewych studied at the Art Students’ League of New York and then served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Upon return from the war, he continued his studies on two consecutive scholarships at the National Academy of Fine Arts and graduated from Pratt Institute with a B.F.A.
Mr. Onyshkewych was a lifetime member of the American Watercolor Society. He was a plein-air painter, known for his works done on location during extended stays abroad in Switzerland, France and Italy. In the summer of 1999, the Musée de Bagnes hosted an exhibit, showcasing over 60 of his mountain scenes from across the Entremont region of Switzerland. In the U.S, the artist was known to take his easel, paints and canvas and head out to paint all along the East Coast. Many of his works have been exhibited in galleries across the country.
Surviving are his wife, Ester Birgitta (Kjellander) Onyshkewych, his children, Andrij Onyshkewych and Lena Payne; his grandchildren, Ryan and Henry Payne; and many extended family members.
The liturgy of Christian burial was celebrated on January 8 at St. Nicholas Byzantine Church in Danbury, Conn. Burial followed in Newtown Village Cemetery.
Sources: The Ukrainian Museum, Cornell Memorial Home.