Vasyl Lopata

Biography

The first specimens of the Ukrainian hryvnia were printed in Canada in 1992, and Vasyl Lopata travelled there to supervise the engraving. Before that he had reworked the portraits, landscapes and ornaments dozens of times; in Toronto he checked the engravers’ work at the Canadian Bank Note Company in person.

He was born on 28 April 1941 in the village of Nova Basan in the Chernihiv region, into a peasant family. His father, Ivan Mykolayovych, ran the village house of culture and was killed near Stalingrad in 1942. His mother, Hanna Antonivna, a collective-farm worker, raised two sons alone. The elder brother, Andriy, later became the author of two books, and Vasyl illustrated his “Kara Peruna”.

From 1948 Lopata studied at the school in Nova Basan, and in 1955 he entered not an art school but an agricultural college for animal husbandry at Mayne, from which he graduated with distinction in 1959 as a junior livestock technician. He drew in his spare time, and in the same years prepared for the entrance examinations to the Kyiv School of Decorative and Applied Art. He did not stay there long: in 1961 he was called up for military service, served in the infantry and was discharged as a corporal. After the army he bypassed the school and in 1964 entered the Kyiv State Art Institute directly; he graduated in 1970, having studied under Viktor Kasiyan. For two more years, until 1972, he worked in the studios of the USSR Academy of Arts under Mykhailo Derehus.

His independent career began with republic-wide and Soviet-wide exhibitions and book illustration. At the publishing house Veselka he cut sixteen woodcuts for Vasyl Shevchuk’s novel “Pobratymy” (1971) without payment; the series won diplomas at the Ukrainian and all-Union book art competitions, was reprinted in Melbourne and was used for a wall calendar in Canada. In 1971 he was admitted to the Union of Artists of Ukraine, the professional association of artists. He gave the following year or two to the colour linocuts “Ukrainian Folk Dumas” (epic songs), and Ukrainian graphic art had no other series like it. Illustrations to Oles Honchar, Ivan Franko and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” followed (the series was marked with a diploma of the USSR Academy of Arts and bought by museums in Ukraine and Russia), and then, for five years, from 1987 to 1992, Shevchenko’s “Kobzar”, the poet’s best-known collection. For it he received the Shevchenko National Prize in 1993. In 1989 he won an international bookplate prize in England: bookplates, posters and postcards make up a noticeable part of his output.

He made the hryvnia with Borys Maximov, from 1991: portraits of historical figures, architectural monuments, landscapes. In the same years, 1991 to 1993, he designed the diplomatic and the ordinary Ukrainian passports.

He travelled a good deal: Poland, Yugoslavia, India, Italy, France, Canada, the United States, Spain. In the 1990s a religious theme appears in his work: thirty-three portraits of the metropolitans of Kyiv and Halych, the series “Ukrainian Saints” and “The Way of the Cross of Ukraine” (both 1993), and the paintings “The Annunciation” and “The Last Supper” (1998), “The Agony in the Garden” (1999) and “Peter’s Denial” (2001). He gave Pope John Paul II a portrait of him in person. He turned to Gogol twice: “A Terrible Vengeance” (1993–1994) and “Taras Bulba” (2006). In 2000–2001 he made the black-and-white linocuts “Marusia Churai”. In all, he left about seven hundred works.

In 1994 Lopata went to the United States and lived in California. Prose came later: “Hopes and Disappointments, or the Metamorphoses of the Hryvnia” (2000), and the autobiographical novellas “Somewhere at the Bottom of My Heart” (2001), “Show Me Your Way, O Lord” (2005) and “I Speak as in Confession” (2011). In 2006 he was admitted to the National Union of Writers of Ukraine, and for the second novella he received the Oles Honchar Literary Prize (2007); the Lesya Ukrainka Literary and Art Prize followed in 2008.

He became Honoured Artist of the Ukrainian SSR in 1979, received the Order of the Badge of Honour in 1982 and the title People’s Artist of Ukraine in 2001. His works are in museums in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Sumy and Dnipro, in the Tretyakov Gallery, in the Library of Congress in the United States, and in Ukrainian museums in New York, Chicago, Toronto and Rome. In 2021, for his eightieth birthday, the exhibition “I Am Yours, Ukraine, Forever!” opened in the Pavlo Tychyna museum-apartment in Kyiv.

Lopata died on 18 September 2025 in San Francisco. In 2026 he was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit, third class.