The beauty of Tavrian painting opens new stages in the creative lives of masters of the Mykolaiv Region. That is how it was with the artist Svitlana Boikova-Kaliuzhna.

She was born in 1971 in Eastern Kazakhstan and at the age of five moved with her parents to Mykolaiv. She could not imagine her life without making: in school years she studied at an art school, then at a college of technologies and design. She received her higher education at the Kyiv University of Culture and Arts, in the Department of Design, and raised her qualification at the Mykolaiv University of Shipbuilding. She was head of the club “Folk Crafts” at the House of Creativity for Children and Youth of Inhulskyi District of Mykolaiv. Since 2020 she has worked as an artist at the Mykolaiv Regional Palace of Culture. Her passions are oil painting, the author’s motanka doll, and decorative painting based on motifs of Tavrian painting. In 2023 she joined the Cultural and Artistic Association “Art-Temptation.” For fruitful creative work, in 2025 she received the honorary distinction “Star of Culture of the City of Mykolaiv.”

Ukrainian folk paintings always drew the artist; she studied them and used them in her work. In recent years she became absorbed in Tavrian painting, which she began to master on her own, learning the strokes, motifs and compositions. Of help were the handbook Tavrian Painting by Liubov Paraniuk and Ruslana Sikalenko and the books Paths to the Lyman by Yevhenia Bondarenko.

Svitlana Boikova-Kaliuzhna likes to work in the genre of the folk picture, joining folklore subjects with the painting. This gives them the philosophical depth with which “Tavryka” is so rich. She works carefully over symbols, so as not to lose the meaning of the compositions she has conceived.

Her first serious work was the thematic piece Berehynia of the South, in which decorative painting, a sea landscape and mythology are interwoven. The sacred theme found a continuation in painting on cloth, from which she makes clothing for the motanka dolls of the collection Tavrian Angels.

The literary and artistic works of Yevhenia Bondarenko inspired the master to paint a large series, Legends of the South. It consists of nine pictures-illustrations created from legends that lived in the coastal districts of the Mykolaiv Region. The main accent is on the picture Larych (on Kinburn, Larych was the name given to the father of the winds). At the centre is depicted the “chicken god,” which brings luck and protects from foul weather. On it is painted Svitlana’s favourite symbol — the Tavrian star, made of the hands of berehynias holding little flames. Around the talisman are stylised images of the nine most widespread winds. Here is the Levanter with dry air, and the Maestro with moderate weather, and the Greco with a strong wind and rain.

Svitlana Boikova-Kaliuzhna takes an active part in actions in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including with works in techniques of folk painting; she takes part in charity exhibitions, fairs and auctions in Ukraine and abroad. From her sketches, in 2023 the walls of the shelter of the Mykolaiv Regional Institute of Postgraduate Pedagogical Education were decorated with Tavrian painting.

Wall painting of the shelter of the Mykolaiv Regional Institute of Postgraduate Pedagogical Education, 2023

Svitlana Boikova-Kaliuzhna is well known in the city. She gives many masterclasses and is the author of solo exhibitions: Berehynia of Hope, Pearls of the Southern Land, Legends of the South, Movement. She has taken part in the thematic displays The Enchanted World of Tavrian Painting, On the Waves of Sea and Steppe, Tavrian Painting: Life Despite the War, Lights of the South. People-Lighthouses, and in the festivals of Tavrian painting The Blue-Eyed Pearl of Mykolaivshchyna and Tavryka Unites, among others. She took part in the project The Ukrainian Lionet Does Not Fear the Cobra of the H. Halahan Chernihiv Regional Art Museum. Reproductions of her paintings entered the album of the same name, issued in 2024. The following year she was invited to give a masterclass in “Tavryka” at the H. Khotkevych Palace of Culture in Lviv.

The artist holds that Tavrian painting has become an inseparable part of her work; she enters with joy into its soft waves and fresh blue. Looking at her works — especially the illustrations to the legends of Yevhenia Bondarenko — one understands how skilfully, through her pictures, the master awakens a love of the Mykolaiv Region.

S. Boikova-Kaliuzhna at the festival “The Blue-Eyed Pearl of the Mykolaiv Region”