About Maria Prymachenko
Maria Oksentiyivna Prymachenko (Ukrainian: Марія Оксентіївна Примаченко; 12 January 1909 [O.S. 30 December 1908] – 18 August 1997) was a Ukrainian folk art painter, who worked in the naïve art style. A self-taught artist, she worked in painting, embroidery and ceramics. In 1966, Prymachenko was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared that 2009 was the year of Prymachenko. A street in Kyiv and a minor planet are both named after her. Pablo Picasso once said, after visiting a Prymachenko exhibition in Paris at the 1937 World's Fair, "I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian." == Personal life == Prymachenko was born to a peasant family and spent the majority of her life in the village of Bolotnia, currently in Vyshhorod Raion, Kyiv Oblast, situated only 30 km (19 mi) from Chornobyl. She attended school for four years, before contracting polio, leaving her with a physical impairment, which impacted her life and art. She described her first artistic experiments in later life: "Once, as a young girl, I was tending a gaggle of geese. When I got with them to a sandy beach, on the bank of the river, after crossing a field dotted with wild flowers, I began to draw real and imaginary flowers with a stick on the sand… Later, I decided to paint the walls of my house using natural pigments. After that I've never stopped drawing and painting." During childhood, Prymachenko's mother taught her embroidery, and by the late 1920s or early 1930s she was a member of the Ivankiv Co-operative Embroidery Association.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.