Rock Art - Ukrainian Eggs

I decided to give my “rock painting” hobby a new twist and try my hand at the Ukrainian art of “pysanky” using rocks instead of eggs. The Ukrainian tradition of egg decorating is called pysanky which is derived from the Ukrainian word “pysaty” which means “to write”.

Ukrainian people have been decorating eggs for thousands of years. In fact, the Ukrainian tradition of egg decoration is older than the Christian celebration of Easter. Eggs are an ancient symbol of the creation and renewal of life, and over time, egg decorating has become associated with Christianity and Easter.I have special memories of decorating eggs through my grandmother who is of Ukrainian descent. Usually around Easter she would decorate eggs using a special homemade “kitska” to draw patterns on eggs with wax. She would then dip the egg in food color dye so that the areas without wax would become colored. She would then draw more designs and dip the egg in other colors. Eventually she would remove the wax using heat to reveal a beautiful, multi-colored design on the egg. To learn more about the art of Ukrainian egg decoration, click > Ukrainian egg decoration  

I didn’t use a traditional wax resist method to create the painted rocks and instead used acrylic paint as the base color and paint pens to draw the designs. While my designs are not necessarily traditional, I tried to keep them in the spirit of spring.

The bowl of wooden eggs are some traditional Ukrainian eggs I inherited from my Ukrainian grandmother.

Fun Fact: According to Wikipedia, a bowl full of pysanky was commonly kept in Ukrainian homes and served not only as a colorful display, but also as protection from all dangers.

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