Janet Kozachek, a detailed artist who paints, sculpts and draws in well-crafted ways, is showcasing the juxtaposition of her poetry and visual art with an exhibit at the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center through Jan. 31.

Her exhibition of works includes those crafted in pencils, charcoals and oil, many of which have come from her poetry books, signed copies of which will be available at the center.

The OCFAC is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday and is located at 649 Riverside Drive in Orangeburg.

‘Celebrating their

presence and words’

The Orangeburg resident recently published her third book, “A Rendering of Soliloquies – Figures Painted in Spots of Time.” Images from the book are featured in the exhibit.

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“Many of them are from this book. I’m showing the original paintings and drawings from the text. I would describe it as a modern-day emblem book. Some people think of it as ekphrastic paintings and poetry side by side. Generally, ekphrastic is when you are writing a poem about somebody else’s work, but this is the same artist, same work. So it’s more like an emblem,” Kozachek said.

“This project started out with just square paintings. I would ask people to pose. One single person in each square painting. I made about 113 of them. I divided them into chapters and then wrote poetry for each painting, or each drawing.

The famed Getty Museum restored the famous painting that was stolen from the UA Museum of Art in 1985.

“I made three versions of the books. One was just paintings. So it’s in color. The second version was a black and white version of mostly drawings. Then the third version published last year is a mixture,” she said.

She enjoyed allowing her subjects to have their own narratives.

“I like to allow people to speak for themselves and have their own narrative. A lot of contemporary poets are sort of confessional. Everything’s in the first person. So in this book, what’s different is that I allow them to speak. That’s why it’s called ‘A Rendering of Soliloquies.’

“When I would draw people, they would give me their stories as they were speaking. And then I made the stories into poems. So it’s celebrating their presence and their words in poems,” Kozachek said

The exhibition also includes self-portraits which she completed during a visit to Romania, but Kozachek said her interest in combining text with images has a long history.

“As a child and well into my teens, I kept wild and irreverent illustrated notebooks. When studying in China many years later, I found a kinship in the art of this culture that required poetic and philosophical literacy of their visual artists.

“This was necessary because Chinese painting is generally accompanied by a poetic text rendered in beautiful calligraphy and stamped with writing in ancient Chinese. Calligraphy and visual art are always inextricably bound in an aesthetic balance between word and image. Later, in my second stint as a graduate student in New York, I studied ekphrastic poetry with J.D. McClatchy, author of ‘Poets on Painters,’ at the Parsons School of Design,” she said.

Some of her drawings are also from her time in Ukraine, where she last visited back in 1995.

‘Everyone wants

to have hope’

One pencil drawing from Ukraine is titled “Tanya Singing.” It is featured in the book “A Rendering of Soliloquies” and is coupled with a poem titled “Song of Soup.” It features a woman who was a friend of her father’s first cousin.

“That was in 1995. That was in Zaporizhzhia,” she said, referring to the city on the Dnieper River in southeastern Ukraine.

She said the Ukrainian influence in her writing and visual art didn’t just come by happenstance.

“My father was Ukrainian. His father and uncle came to the United States shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. Their brother, Maxim, remained behind in Kremenetz, Ukraine. When the revolution broke out, the family was severed. One part was developing in the United States and the other in what would become the Soviet Union,” Kozachek said.

“My grandfather exchanged letters with his brother in Ukraine up until the late 1930s, when the Soviets annexed Kremenetz and confiscated what was to be my grandfather’s estate. There was apparently some visiting and inquiries made by my great-uncle in an attempt to reconnect to family there in the 1950s, but for the most part everything went dark until the collapse of the Soviet Union,” she said.

Kozachek said the two families were reunited shortly thereafter through a pen pal who Maxim’s granddaughter acquired in Pennsylvania.

“She eventually visited New Jersey and South Carolina, and my father and I went to Ukraine to see his first cousins, their children and grandchildren for the first time. My father’s cousins arranged for us to visit the old family home where his father was raised.

“Through my brother’s genealogical research, we discovered more extended family members. We basically all share the same great-grandparents, who were property owners benefitting from my great-grandfather’s stature as a public prosecutor,” she said.

Kozachek continued, “Some of the people who posed for me and are entered into my paintings, drawings and writing come from places with names which were quite foreign a few years ago, but are now familiar: Kyiv, Lviv and Zaporizhzhia.”

She said the ongoing war between Russian and Ukraine has made her feel sad and wonder if she’ll ever get back to visit Ukraine.

“Who knows? I suppose what it gives me is a certain sense of historical déjà vu because when my grandfather’s family was separated and two brothers came to the U.S. and one didn’t make it out, they did communicate for a number of years. Then Stalin put a stop to all that, and the Soviets annexed Kremenetz, the town where they’re from.

“At that point in the late ’30s, the communication just cut off, just stopped. Why I feel that it’s a certain sense of déjà vu is that it’s the same thing now with communications being cut off, with infrastructure being bombed. So now communication isn’t reliable anymore. It just occurs to me how evil that is,” Kozachek said.

She said the name of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin does not conjure up good feelings.

“No, of course not. No one feels good about Putin. That’s why I satirized him in one of my drawings,” Kozachek said.

She has cousins in Lviv and Kyiv and hopes that the war will come to a swift end.

“Everyone wants to have hope. I know eventually it will end. How it will, how much will get destroyed before it ends, I don’t know. Russians have been pillaging all the artwork and stealing it and taking it to Russia, or destroying it. That I take personally,” she said, because she studied the artworks of several museums in Ukraine.

“To think of all of that being looted and destroyed (is heartbreaking). I have no idea whether they’re going to be still there or not,” Kozachek said.

She said communication with her Ukrainian cousins remains sketchy because of the destruction of infrastructure from Russian attacks. One of her extended cousins is part of the Ukrainian army.

“The pipeline is gone. I feel the way most people feel. It’s sad. There’s a little bit of historical déjà vu about it because of this cutting off and this trying to destroy a language and a culture. I don’t understand that. Why would you have a problem with someone’s language that you have to try to eliminate it?

“I guess the idea is that Putin sees Ukraine as a part of his territory and his culture. It’s like the left hand of his own body or something like that, but it isn’t like that. The Ukrainians are very proud of their culture and their language and heritage. They want to establish that,” Kozachek said.

She continued, “My father’s cousins mentioned to me that during the Soviet Union, a Ukrainian wasn’t even really allowed in schools or anything. Everyone has to speak Russian. So I think as a protest now, people aren’t speaking Russian anymore. I read that in the news, too. Language has become quite an issue.”

She said it is hurtful to think of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

“It’s very hurtful, yes, and very sad. I try to put my mind on other things. Unfortunately, though, like so much that we hear about, it was very upsetting at first. Then as it grinds on, you start getting numb to it. Just like we hear about so many mass shootings in the U.S., and then people start getting numb to it. That’s dangerous, too. You realize that getting numb to it is very unhealthy, as well,” Kozachek said.

Upcoming work

The artist is preparing for the release of her fourth book titled “The Book of Bothersome Cats.” It is an illustrated humor book which features her drawings of anthropomorphic cats and corresponding poetry.

“The cats all have some kind of aberration, things that people find annoying. It appeals to two audiences really: people who are bothered by things that they find difficult to voice, but also, of course, people who are enamored of cats. After that book, I’m working on a book that’ll be more difficult to write because it requires a little more research. It’s an overlay of arts and science and genetics and rare disease,” Kozachek said.

She continued, “In February, I’m also going to be doing a visual art and poem performance called ‘Duets’ with Professor Florina Nastase, who I met at the University of Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Iași, Romania.

“She is in the English department there, and she has written a wonderful book on American poetry. She’s a poet herself. So we’re going to do duets. We’re going to accompany her poetry and my poetry with visual art. I’m using the visual art that’s not very intricate. It’s very spontaneous and fluid.”

For more information about Kozachek, contact her by phone at 803-515-3804, email at kozachek@bellsouth.net and online at http://kozachekart.blogspot.com/.

Contact the writer: dgleaton@timesanddemocrat.com or 803-533-5534. Follow “Good News with Gleaton” on Twitter at @DionneTandD

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