Best in Kyiv

Best portrait artist: Georgy Arkenko

By Dana Liss, Kyiv Post Staff Writer

Dana Liss
Georgy Arkenko has an eye for portraits as well as decent prices.

The Best Of team is not averse to making a public spectacle of itself.

Over the years we have plopped ourselves down in the middle of the bustling underpass at Maidan Nezalezhnosti in central Kyiv to have our portraits drawn over and over again by a number of different artists.

The purpose? We wanted to keep on top of who is Kyiv’s best portrait artist – and to provide several hours of free entertainment for passersby.

On any given day, there are generally between 30 and 40 artists plying their trade in the underpass on a rotating basis. On weekdays, they tend to be at their easels from 10 a.m. until midnight. There is a distinct increase in activity at weekends and on holidays.

The bunch of artists sampled by the team was a decidedly motley crew, and their portraits also varied greatly – in style, quality and price. Many artists offer the whole gamut, from grotesque and amusing caricatures to more-or-less realistic portraits.

In general, small black-and-white pencil drawings cost anywhere from Hr 20 to Hr 40, larger versions go for as much as Hr 60, while full-color pastel portraits may cost up to Hr 200. Some artists even said they can arrange to have you immortalized in oils for around $150.

One standard for comparison between artists is the amount of extra background details that they are willing or able to include in their drawings. One of the artists, Oleksander Ajzapetov, who is actually a political scientist supplementing his income, will spend well over his advertised three minutes to knock off a reasonable cartoon portrait for Hr 10. However, when asked to include something extra in the drawing, say a quirky allusion to Kyiv life, Ajzapetov might not be able to.

Another portrait artist worth mentioning is Oleksander Oleksuk, a bearded gentleman in a baseball-cap who will incorporate as many people as you like into the drawing for Hr 15 and – much to the delight of the crowd - depict you in a compromising position, complete with Kyiv landscape, a stick of kovbasa and pair of slippers. Well done, we say.

In terms of more serious portraits, Valery Varytko pulled off a worthy pencil sketch for only Hr 20. Now, the eyes may have lacked our real-life sparkle and there may have been a sort of Komsomol, socialist-realism feel about the whole effort, but we like what he sees.

Much less impressive was the priciest of the artists sampled – Serhy Lyhogrom, who charged Hr 40. Though his drawing was certainly the largest, it was rendered as a cartoon style, lacked detail and utterly failed to bring out the team’s chiseled good looks.

So, the award for the best portrait artist goes to Georgy Arkenko. A sullen, moody (even, dare we say it, artsy) type, Arkenko produced a small pencil sketch for Hr 30 that the Best Of team recognized as most successfully capturing our warmth and spirit.

Look around, watch the artists at work and the models gazing dreamily off into space – take your pick, assume the pose and have your time in Kyiv immortalized.