Pièce de résistance Artist updates 1891 painting to showcase modern freedom fighters in Ukraine By: Alan Small Posted: 1:20 PM CST Friday, Feb. 23, 2024

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This article was published 23/02/2024 (890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Michael Boss has some of the grim determination Ukraine’s soldiers and citizens have shown during the past two years.

The Winnipeg painter, whose ancestors hail from the European nation Russia invaded Feb. 24, 2022, has converted the heightened anger and despair he’s felt after seeing the tragic images from the conflict on television and social media and put it into his art.

“I just wanted to do more. This is a reminder that this war is still going on and Ukrainians need our support now more than ever,” he says.

Boss’s muse is Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, an 1891 painting by Ukrainian-born artist Ilya Repin, which depicts another moment in Ukrainian history — a 17th-century attack by the Ottoman Empire — when its people fought stubbornly for their freedom.

In the week leading up to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Boss put the final touches on Ukrainian Kozaks Send a Letter to Putin, a 1.2-by-2.4-metre oil painting that adds contemporary resistance fighters and rebels that fit alongside Repin’s cossacks from 1676, which Boss replicated with his own brush.

Among the new likenesses Boss has added in his version of Repin’s work is Austin Lathlin-Bercier, a soldier from Opaskwayak Cree Nation who enlisted in the Ukrainian army in 2022.

He was 25 when he was killed in the fighting in November.

“He had no skin in the game. He knew it was an injustice taking place,” says Boss, who sought and was granted permission by Lathlin-Bercier’s family to include him in the painting.

“I read this amazing letter from one of his comrades they sent to his family that said he was just an amazing guy that kept (them) all together and kept their spirits up.”

Repin’s painting shows cossacks — kozak is an alternate spelling of cossack; both mean “free man” in Ukrainian — laughing while their leader writes a letter filled with insults to Mehmed IV, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1676, who demanded the Ukrainians’ surrender.

“They sent him the nastiest, foulest letter, telling him to go screw himself, basically, with every epithet they could think of,” Boss says.

The letter-writer in his new painting is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and next to him is Valery Zaluzhny, who until recently was commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

“I am completely amazed by him,” Boss says of Zelenskyy. “There are people who criticize him for this or that, but he’s in the eye of the hurricane and he’s travelling all around the world to raise the support. He’s so articulate and he’s so pointed. He has Putin’s number.”

Boss began putting his spin on Repin’s 130-year-old work in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea and regions on the Ukraine-Russia border.

He added Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag and some 21st-century rebels — bikers — to the laughing cossacks surrounding the letter-writer.

After Russia’s 2022 invasion, Boss teamed up with Martha Street Studios to make 75 prints of the work, and the money raised, about $19,000, was donated to the Ukrainian Red Cross, which purchased a truck that delivers aid in and around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

A few months after the prints sold, Boss had the urge to take the rebellious Zaporozhian cossacks to another level.

“I’m not finished with this image,” he says, describing his mindset in 2020. “There’s more to do with it; I want to explore it more. I wanted to do something larger.”

Russia occupies about 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory, most of it gained during the 2022 invasion.

About eight million Ukrainians have been displaced by the conflict and another 8.3 million have fled the country, about 220,000 of whom have moved to Canada.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified 9,614 civilian deaths in Ukraine caused by the Russian invasion, as of Sept. 10, 2023, including 554 children. More than 17,000 civilians have been injured.

Boss is seeking a gallery to exhibit his large painting. In the meantime it sits in his crowded Exchange District studio amid his other works and another muse, his 1979 Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

A likeness of “the Ghost of Kyiv,” a fighter ace who Ukraine’s military has admitted was a mythical figure, sits on a chopper in Boss’s painting.

“Motorcycles have an aura about them, a kind of wildness and freedom. This is a symbol that can be used that can exemplify this group of people and the Ukrainians, who are the descendants of (the cossacks),” he says.

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall