Viktor Chumachenko: “The Muse Is an Excuse for the Lazy”

This reading guide summarises the interview published in MAGIC WOMAN in November–December 2017. The original six pages are reproduced below in full.

Early experiments and artistic education

Chumachenko recalls growing up in Babichevo, making toys and cutting his school primer into a collage. At twelve or thirteen, he began designing wall newspapers. An unsuccessful attempt to enter art school in Rostov did not end his ambition: his mother bought a ten-volume art course, which he studied alongside visits to museums and work in an art studio.

Vitaly Kulikov and the structure of the picture plane

Vitaly Nikolaevich Kulikov became an important artistic guide and friend. They met during Chumachenko’s studies in Kharkiv. Although Chumachenko was not his formal student, conversations in Kulikov’s studio shaped his understanding of composition, form and colour. The 2017 exhibition “37” at Manufaktura was dedicated to their thirty-seven years of friendship.

Friendship, independent judgement and experiment

The interview also describes Chumachenko’s friendship with the Kharkiv group Litera A and his participation in its exhibitions by invitation. He places more value on sustained investigation and the views of close friends and fellow artists than on adjusting his work to general audience approval. Working with materials and pictorial space brings discoveries that luck alone cannot provide.

Teaching as a way of understanding one’s craft

Teaching helped the artist put accumulated experience into words, separate useful ideas from unnecessary information and take responsibility for what he passed on. His drawing workshops at Manufaktura used practical exercises while adapting to students of different ages and levels. Explaining a subject to one person could help the whole group see it from another angle.

From geometric abstraction to “Meeting” and “Oxygen”

Chumachenko describes several periods represented in the exhibition: experiments with geometric abstraction; the 2009 “Meeting” series of twenty-two paintings, in which a cube developed into abstraction; and “Oxygen”, a figurative series connected with events in his own life. Work, war, ecology and love enter that series through what catches his attention and becomes an image.

The artist as worm, flea and bee

To explain different ways of organising a picture, the artist imagines a worm sensing its way across the surface, a flea leaving points and trajectories, and a bee building a structured honeycomb. At the time of the interview, he identifies with the bee: constructing pictorial space and filling it with meaning through the work itself.

Daily work and the muse

The title comes from Chumachenko’s rejection of waiting for inspiration. He describes insight arising through routine work, as structure, colour and plastic relationships gradually come together. Asked what he would do if all his paintings sold, he answers that he would buy paints and canvases and continue working, while also considering travel to see the art he admires.