Mykhailo Kokin

Mykhailo Kokin was a distinguished painter whose works were imbued with Ukrainian lyricism with an Impressionistic touch — vivid, alive, suffused with air and sunlit colour.

In the artwork of Mykhailo Kokin, one sees a fresh vision of life and the subtle facets of beauty in everyday peacetime existence. The artist's creative path was one of endless searching, refinement, and discovery — all dedicated to the beauty of the natural world.

The artist was born in 1921 in the city of Dnipro. From 1936 to 1941 he studied at the city's art college, where his teachers were the noted painters M. Panin and M. Pohribniak.

The war, however, prevented the young man from completing his studies. Believing his place was at the front, he enrolled in the Stalingrad Tank School. Mykhailo served throughout the entire war and sustained a serious wound. Decorated with orders and medals, and holding the rank of captain, he had every opportunity to pursue a distinguished military career — but the pull of creative work proved stronger. Kokin returned to his home city and completed his studies at the art college in 1947.

He also graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute in 1954, where he studied under the distinguished Ukrainian painters H. S. Melikhov, V. M. Kostetsky, and O. S. Hryhoriev.

The young artist was invited to remain in Kyiv, but chose to return to his native Dnipro. For many years he served as chief artist of the Dnipropetrovsk Art Production Combine, while continuing his own creative practice virtually every day.

From 1957 Mykhailo Kokin’s paintings were featured in regional, republican, and all-union exhibitions. He held several solo exhibitions not only in his native Dnipro but also in Kyiv, Mykolaiv, and Kryvyi Rih.

In 1976 he was awarded the title of Honoured Artist of Ukraine, and in 2001 — People's Artist of Ukraine.

Over the course of his lifetime the master created approximately 3,000 canvases. Mykhailo Kokin passed away in 2009.

The artist was drawn to the classical genres of art — figurative composition, portrait, landscape, and still life. From his brush came the series My Ukraine!, Kamchatka, Chukotka, and Crimea, as well as individual works including Above the Dnipro, Evening Song, Building Ships, The Little Bridge, As He Fell from His Horse…, Red Viburnum, Bird Cherry Beyond the Window, and others.

UFDA digitized Spring Waters (1981) by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv. This painting is now available for viewing on the fund's website.

Mykhailo Kokin’s original paintings encompass landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.

His landscapes are marked by lyricism and a narrative, genre-like quality. Art critics and admirers of his talent noted that it is precisely in Kokin's lyrical landscapes — infused with fresh and vivid feeling — that his greatest creative achievements and most original discoveries are to be found. 

Art critic L. Bohdanova observes that, for all their emotionality and lyricism (qualities characteristic of the landscape genre in many artists), Mykhailo Kokin's landscapes are always instantly recognisable. What sets them apart is a logical clarity of intent, a rigorous selectivity, and a structural precision of composition that leaves nothing to chance — qualities that lend his landscapes an inherently painterly, pictorial character.

Portraits occupy a significant place in Kokin's body of work. They vary greatly in character, compositional approach, and painterly structure, yet all are united by a profound love of humanity. Every portrait he created is distinguished by heightened attentiveness to the individual qualities of his subject.

Kokin's still lifes, Bohdanova notes, are not merely beautiful depictions of an inanimate world — they are an inseparable part of the living world at large. And so they exist among living nature, representing a distinctive hybrid genre: the landscape-still life. Vivid, alive, suffused with air and sunlight, they seem to have absorbed the Ukrainian lyrical spirit and the poetry of the natural world, uniting these with a pellucid purity of colour and an unaffected directness.

In the final ten to fifteen years of his life, the artist frequently visited Paris, where he encountered the work of the great Impressionists and continued to paint new canvases. It was the landscapes and still lifes born in France that gave rise to the description of Mykhailo Kokin as a "Ukrainian Impressionist."