Myroslav Yahoda

Myroslav Yahoda, sometime transliterated as Yagoda (, 23 August 1957  – 11 March 2018) was a painter, graphic artist, poet, novelist, playwright and set designer. The "Ukrainian Goya" — with true integrity in his diverse art — was a prominent figure in the Ukrainian underground art scene.
Biography.
Born to a peasant family, he graduated from school in the village of Girnyk in the Lviv Oblast. After school he studied at the Chervonograd Mining College (even though he never graduated), and in 1975–1977 served in the Soviet army.
In 1980 he came to Lviv, and in 1981-1987 studied in the Ukrainian Institute of Printing (specialization in Graphics Arts), while also painting village churches for a living.
He gradually entered the Lviv art scene, but remained on the sidelines with his rather secluded life. 
He participated in exhibitions and art events in Lviv, Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, but mostly abroad — in Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Germany. In 2001 he worked in Graz (Austria) as a fellow of the International Cultural City Network program. By the late 1980s, he became a cult figure of the Ukrainian art underground.
He died in his studio in Lviv on 11 March 2018.
Visual Art.
 Drawing has always been an important part of Yahoda's life. He proclaimed his artistic credo — already well formed and deeply experienced — in his manifesto "The Barbarian Trinity": ""... an artist must ask a question to find himself and go to history ... Get out of the picture, beyond that, then make the move to the Universe. Brushes are hidden in the head. The glimmer of the picture is increasingly absorbed out of consciousness, as a nourishment for the subconscious Me. In the painting, its multi-dimensionality is realized through intrinsic actions”".
Yahoda's visual art can be divided into two main periods:
As a whole, all of Yahoda's visual art was creating of a kind of "mental mirrors": "I paint my world so that those who have watched it may find what is inside them". In a broad context, Yahoda's painting continues the European expressionist line of Goya — Munk — Bacon with its tragic worldview, the perception of the world as a territory of horror, the anticipation of catastrophe, the grotesque and the mysticism.
Literature.
Complementing his visual art work with prose and poetic creativity, Yahoda was not satisfied with traditional means and "extracted the blood of words" - creating his own aphoristic language with particular sounds and neologisms, stylistic figures, intonation and the author's emphasis on words. This is how he brought the reader into his imaginative worlds, semantic fields and feelings.
In 1991, for the first time, Yahoda published a selection of his poetry "Madhouse" in the magazine №6. In 1992, he published poetry in the "Kremniuk" samizdat magazine. 
In 1997 Yahoda published his novel "The War of Small Cruel Numbers" (with the avant-garde "broken" writing technique), as a Ukrainian reminiscence of G. Heine's "Ideas. Le Grand".
In 2005 Yahoda participated in the program of the New Ukrainian Art Festival "24 hours.UA" at the De Novo International Art Symposium at the Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski in (Warsaw, Poland). He conducted a poetic reading of "Berries of All Countries, Unite!" and a performance of "Fish — A Mirror Image".
In 2008, Yahoda took part in the project "Ecclesiastes of Another Alphabet" in the "Mezzanine" art studio in Kyiv where he presented his artistic manifesto "The Barbarian Trinity".
Theatre.
In 2000, his play "Nothing" was published in the literary almanac "The Royal Forest". In 2002 the director Maria Veres put on the play "Nothing" (with the script and set design by Yahoda) in the "Sky Theater", which took place on the premises of the Maria Zankovetska Theatre.
Yahoda closely collaborated with , then Transcarpathian director. In 2001, they co-created the set design for the play "The Winter Tale" based on the works of William Shakespeare, that was performed in the National Theater in Budapest. In 2003 A.Vidnyanszky put on Yahoda's play "Nothing" (in Hungarian) at the Transcarpathian Regional Hungarian Drama Theater in Berehove. They also worked jointly on two more plays — "Dziady" by Adam Mickiewicz in the Beregovsky Theater (2001), and "Shakespeare's Wreath" at the Gyula Castle Theatre (2005).
Based on Yahoda's poetry, a one-man show "The Road to Light" was staged in Lviv in 2010.
Exhibitions.
By the early 2000s, Yahoda's art was more often exhibited abroad than in Lviv. He very selectively participated in group exhibitions — both the artist himself and the curators preferred to present his original art individually.