Kateryna Bilokur: Google doodle on Ukrainian painter on her 120th birthday

Happy Birthday Kateryna Bilokur!!!

Google today dedicates a beautifully-designed doodle to Kateryna Bilokur on her 120^th birthday. Kateryna Bilokur was a renowned painter from Ukraine who got the honorary title ‘People's Artist of Ukraine’.

Kateryna Bilokur (Kateryna Vasylivna Bilokur) was born on December 7, 1900 in Bohdanivka, a village in Kyiv region in Ukraine. At her young age she didn’t get primary education. She required spending her maximum hours as a farm worker, but she never gave up hope.

Kateryna Bilokur crafted brushes out of raw materials and paints out of foods like beets and elderberries to pursue her artistic passion in her free time, with nature as her muse. Her works gradually became popular in the late 1930s and 1940s for her interest in nature.

Kateryna Bilokur witnessed a twist in her life at the age of 40. Inspired by a song on the radio, she sent a letter of admiration to the Ukrainian singer Oksana Petrusenko with an original work attached. She was highly impressed and helped her to get her first exhibition.

Many may not know that the globally-acclaimed Spanish painter Pablo Picasso saw her work exhibited in Paris. Pablo Picasso commented, “If we had an artist of this level, we would make the whole world talk about her.”

Over the next two decades following Kateryna Bilokur’s first exhibition, her unique depictions of transcendent natural beauty reached an international audience, notably earning huge praise from the Spanish master Pablo Picasso at a 1954 exhibition in Paris.

Kateryna Bilokur died at the age of 61 on June 9, 1961 at Bohdanivka in Yahotyn Raion. She was named a People’s Artist of Ukraine, the highest arts award for Ukrainian citizens. Google today pays tribute to her with a mesmerizing doodle on her 120^th birthday.

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