A Colorful Past and Present : Ukrainian Easter Eggs Provide Holiday Glow

Chances are that the Easter bunny won’t be hiding anything quite so exquisite this Sunday as the intricately decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs that Mary Ann Healy and her friends have painted each Lenten season for the past 10 years.

Known as pysanky , the colorful, symbol-laden eggs are part of a tradition that dates back more than 2,000 years, having survived Ukraine’s 10th-Century transformation from paganism to Christianity and the repressive Soviet regime that banned them in the 20th Century.

A natural symbol of new life and thus Christ’s resurrection, the eggs are traditionally blessed on Easter morning and then given as gifts on special occasions or used as talismans believed to bring good fortune and abundant harvests.

Healy, 59, a former Catholic nun and teacher who is now a practicing attorney, learned how to craft the eggs with her friend Terry Bastian in a workshop at Valley College. Although she is not Ukrainian, Healy said making pysanky is just as much a religious and social occasion as it is an aesthetic expression for her.

“It’s sharing with each other. . . . we appreciate each other’s work and we learn from each other,” she said. “And we talk about the symbols. If nothing else, we’re talking about what all those things mean.”

The symbols, each usually incorporated into a filigree-like whirl of patterns and colors, include horses, which represent power; interlocking circular lines, which represent everlasting life, and pine branches, signs of the renewal of spring.

“I’ve always loved the butterfly as it emerges from the cocoon as a symbol of beauty and new life and also as the symbol of the Resurrection because you have Christ coming from the tomb and there was no life and now there is,” Healy said.

Healy and her friends are not alone in their passion for pysanky, according to Daria Chaikovsky, director of the Ukrainian Art Center in Los Angeles, where a collection of pysanky is on display.

“I attend the California Egg Artistry Show every March and I know that so many people of different nationalities and colors that are doing the Ukrainian egg,” Chaikovsky said. “Here, especially in California, it is a very mixed cultural group, so that it has become an all-encompassing cultural expression.

“It’s a living art and that makes me very happy because it is continuing, broadening and expanding,” she said.

To Chaikovsky, the only disappointing thing about the craft’s newfound popularity is that some people stray from traditional motifs, but persist in calling their eggs pysanky.

“People have used just the technique itself and called it a pysanka, “ she said. “That is all right and that is wonderful because it still has their meaning, but it is an egg done in a batik style, not a pysanka. “

Pysanky comes from the Ukrainian word pysank , “to write,” because the motifs are “written” on the egg.

Healy’s delight in creating the pysanky prompted her to look into its rich history, an investigation that has taken her on two trips to Ukraine. During her last trip, she said, a family from the Carpathian Mountains brought her two pysanky made in the 1970s, the era when such religious ornaments were suppressed.

Understanding the Ukrainian struggle to maintain cultural identity and how long it takes to make just one pysanka, Healy treasured the gifts.

Even the simplest pysanka design, Healy says, can take up to four hours to complete.

First, the pattern is hand-penciled onto a raw egg, demanding a steady hand and discriminating eye. Usually, the artisan will use a traditional pattern from a book or photograph, but occasionally he or she will adapt the pattern to personalize the pysanka.

Then beeswax is applied to the areas that will remain white and the egg is dyed in the first, lightest, color. The process repeats, using the wax to preserve the lighter designs as the rest of the egg is dyed in successively darker colors.

“After the color dries, we melt off the beeswax with a Bunsen burner,” Healy said. “The most tragic thing that can happen is that the egg breaks at this point.”

When the beeswax is removed, the egg is shellacked and allowed to dry. Finally, the inside of the egg is drained through a pin-sized hole, leaving only the empty, decorated shell.

The result is beautiful but fragile, perhaps too fragile for the unstable ground of Southern California.

“My own poor eggs met a sad fate last year when they all were broken in the Northridge earthquake,” remembered Healy, who displayed her pysanky next to her collection of salt and pepper shakers. “They really crashed. If you can imagine an empty eggshell hitting the wooden floor. I don’t think any of them survived.”

But the blow of seeing her pysanky pulverized by the temblor was softened by the generosity of her friends, who each gave her an egg the following April.

“They have tremendous meaning, the amount of time and effort that goes into each one makes it very, very special when it is a gift,” said Dorothy Payne, one of the women who paints eggs with Healy.

The group often give the painstakingly detailed eggs as gifts at weddings or for the birth of a child. Healy said her eggs occasionally become the centerpiece of her Easter dinner table.

“I always hate to part with them because I love them myself,” Healy said. “I love the meaning in them and I love that it’s within my capabilities of doing them. I don’t have to be a professed ‘artist.’ ”