Arts & Entertainment

Pys-What? Pysanky!

Armatage resident Jennifer Noice shows off a Ukranian folk art she picked up...in Denver, CO.

Even without the bright afternoon sun streaming in through Jennifer Noice's living room window, it would be hard to miss the basket of brightly-colored eggs sitting on her coffee table. Such is the detail that the intricate patterns almost seem embroidered. 

These definitely aren't the Easter eggs from your childhood. Called "pysanky," the decorated eggs are traditional Easter and good-luck gifts in the Ukraine, and use designs and motifs possibly dating back to pre-Christian times. Even the individual colors can tell a story

Noice, an Armatage resident, first picked up the art from a friend obsessed with all things Eastern European when she lived in Colorado. Now, she and her family make them year-round—some even have little notes painted on them to commemorate when they were made, like during a blizzard that closed a school where Noice was teaching.

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Decorating the eggs involves a painstaking process of heating up special tools in the flame of a candle, filling their reservoirs with wax, then slowly applying the wax to the egg to blank out parts of the egg that you don't want painted when you dip them in various colored dyes. 

The end result, though, is spectacular.

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If there's a downside to the art, it's probably the need to use raw eggs. If all goes well, post-painting, the egg's innards will slowly dry, leaving nothing to rot or smell. Unless its shell cracks as it dries, that is.

"Sometimes, we'll smell something stinky around the house, like there's a dead mouse in the walls," Noice said. "My first thought is 'Oh, I've got to go check the pysanky.'"

Still, Noice said she likes the impermanence of the art, and the threat that all her hard work could be undone by chance.

"Its almost like (giving a pysanky egg) is a sacrifice," she said. "You spend hours and hours creating something beautiful, and then it's gone."

Noice is offering to teach fellow  parents the art of pysanky-making on Mar. 29 to raise money for the school. The cost is $30 per person. Sign up here.

 

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