the mystery of vyaceslav legkobit

Judging by the frequency with which images from Everyone Likes to Draw by the Ukranian illustrator Vyaceslav Legkobit turn up on blogs, they must be a favourite of artists, graphic designers, illustrators and people who enjoy vintage children’s books. It was originally published in 1968, though my copy in English dates from 1975.

…

…

…

…

It’s not hard to see why so many people, adults and children alike, are attracted to Legkobit’s images. His illustrations have a confidence and swiftness indicating an artist steeped in the folk-art traditions of his country, to the point where the pages seem not so much to be designed, as to have sprung from a world where things just look that way. That ease of creating a complete and plausible imaginative universe can only come when an artist/illustrator has skills honed to perfection. The positive and negative shapes in these illustrations are masterful, making the images hover somewhere between narrative and sheer pattern. Colour lends them theatricality. All those plushy reds, vibrant blues and sunny yellows make me smile. The books are flimsy, slender paperbacks, and it’s a testament to how much they were loved that they’re still around, evidently treasured by generations of readers. I know that had I seen these when I was a child, the illustrations would have been a great encouragement to get busy with my crayons and paints. Their apparent effortlessness isn’t off-putting to fledgling painters, who can get started  by the age-old tradition of copying.

…

…

The internet yields relatively little about Legkobit beyond his nationality and the fact that he was born in 1941, and I find the absence of information to be remarkable given how well-loved his images are. It seems unlikely that he’s still alive and illustrating, as the cut-off point of his work seems to be prior to 1980.

…

I have another book by the artist, dated 1975. Just a glance at the cover makes me hear the music of Stravinsky!

…

…

Above and below: two of my favourite Legkobit illustrations. Perfect combinations of form, colour, pattern and character.

…

…

I’ve found Svetlana Skryabina’s HanaRivka Etsy shop to be an excellent source of Russian children’s books. Svetlana is knowledgeable on her subject, as can be seen in her excellent blog. Moreover parcels from her arrive promptly and the books are always as she describes.

UPDATE:

My thanks to Svetlana Skryabina, who guided me to a Russian site that has some information, though there is nothing beyond 1978.

Legkobit was born in 1941 in the vicinity of Kiev. His parents died during the war and he was thereafter raised by a family who gave him his surname. In 1964 he studied at the Faculty of Graphic Art at the Kiev Art Institute. He is described as an illustrator and animator, his output listed as ‘picture books with his own text’, ‘children’s magazines’ and ‘illustrations for children’s poems’. In an article dated 1971 he explains that his time at art school was quite brief, followed by three years of drawing ‘art cartoons’ and making drawings for children’s magazines and books. He also says that he doesn’t yet know whether he’s exclusively a ‘children’s artist’, but he definitely ‘draws for kids like me’. He sounds very likeable and open to where his art might carry him. A comment has been left on the site by ‘Igor’, who writes that his parents knew the artist. Igor fills in a few tantalising details. It seems that Legkobit was married to a woman named Svetlana. The couple lived on the 16th floor of an apartment block, and they had no children. The marriage failed, there was a divorce and it seems Legkobit may have suffered a ‘creative crisis’. Igor ends by saying that he remembers the artist’s wonderful smile. And we can see that he did indeed have a lovely smile, because unexpectedly for a man so shrouded in mysteries, there’s a photograph:

mr bones

…

It’ll be no surprise to Artlog visitors that I collect, as well as make puppets, and here’s one that I’ve had so long I’m not entirely sure where it came from. However, because it has the folk-art character of the Mexican Dia de Los Muertos, I suspect it was amongst the merchandise offered at the wonderful exhibition on that theme, The Skeleton at the Feast, held at the old Museum of Mankind when the ethnographical collections of the British Museum were at 6 Burlington Gardens.

…

…

I have the exhibition catalogue too, which is a rich resource jam-packed with enticing illustrations. It was authored by Elizabeth Carmichael and produced by British Museum Publications in 1991. Plenty of reasonably-priced second-hand copies at Abebooks, and a ‘must-have’ for anyone interested in the subject.

…

…

Norstein and Yarbusova

Above: Francesca Yarbusova illustration for The Fox and the Hare

…

Above: the cover of The Fox and the Hare

…

All of Yuri Norstein’s animated films have been designed  by his wife and collaborator, Francesca Yarbusova, and two of those films, Hedgehog in the Fog (author: Sergey Kozlov) and The Fox and the Hare (author: Vladimir Dal) are available as illustrated books.

…

Above: Francesca Yarbusova illustration for The Fox and the Hare

…

The books are not collections of stills from the films, but are freshly illustrated by Yarbusova. As such the images work beautifully because they’re designed for the proportions of the pages, and cleverly telescope sequences from the films into single illustrations of great charm. For Hedgehog in the Fog Yarbusova has produced a soft-edged graininess in the drawings not so far from the atmosphere-drenched shimmer of light and mist in the film, while for The Fox and the Hare her drawings are sharper yet still rewardingly painterly.

…

My own copies are in Russian, not because I speak the language, but because I love the look of it on the pages. Plus it makes me think of the soundtracks for the two films, which I’ve always admired.

…

Above and below: Francesca Yarbusova illustrations for  Hedgehog in the Fog

…

…

Norstein is an animator of genius, but the look of his films cannot be separated from the design contributions made by Yabusova. It’s good to see her artwork foregrounded in these books, and good too to have a different way of enjoying the stories that made such wonderful animations.

…

Above: the cover of  Hedgehog in the Fog

…

the one that got away

In the late 1960s I was an actor/puppeteer with the Caricature Theatre, a company that toured extensively. I’ve always been an enthusiastic early morning explorer when in new places, and for me one of the great pleasures of touring was discovering the byways of the towns and cities visited. Often I was rambling in the early mornings, long before businesses were open, and it was in this way I came upon a backstreet shop in Exeter that caught my attention. It had a window of the old-fashioned variety, not large, and situated at chest level… rather like a sweet shop… with a rail and half-curtain at the back, dividing the display from the interior beyond. There wasn’t much room for wares, and at this remove I can recall only one object on show, a framed gouache that halted me in my tracks the moment I saw it.  There was no label, but I knew it as the cover artwork for Alan Garner’s children’s fantasy novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, of which I had a much loved and dog-eared paperback copy.

…

…

Now this was not a grand-looking establishment, but a rather dusty shop, and the gouache was modestly framed. I got it into my head that it was something my meagre resources might stretch to. The director of the Caricature Theatre, Jane Phillips, had been known to allow me the odd advance against a Friday pay-day when on tour, and so I planned my financial strategy. But I needed to know the price of the painting. (Jane would want that crucial information before agreeing.) I returned to the shop the next day, and every morning thereafter in the hope that someone would be there. It had the air of one of those places that kept rather random hours. I raced to it after performances, but it was always closed. I left Exeter empty-handed.

The decades passed, but every time I picked up my well-thumbed Brisingamen, I thought about that backstreet shop with its shadowy interior and the little bit of magic I spied in its window, and I wondered how the gouache would have found its way there. I’d discovered that the artist was George Adamson, born in New York in 1913, but educated in the UK. He’d studied at Liverpool College of Art, and from the 1960s had illustrated Norman Hunter’s Professor Brainstawm books. But my interest lay only in his iconic covers for Alan Garner’s Brisingamen and Gomrath, and I still feel a frisson of childish excitement when I look at them.

…

Today I discovered that George Adamson died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. His place of death… Exeter.

…

‘I could not have hoped for the mood of the book to be better expressed. George Adamson has caught it exactly. Fenodyree is just as I imagined him and the eyes are the best part of the jacket. I am delighted.’

Alan Garner

…

Alan Garner at the time The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was published in 1960.

…

haunted

Kevin and the Sunflowers

2009 – Acrylic on Panel – 62 x 59 cm

Private Collection

…

I’ve long been making works about Saint Kevin and the Blackbird, and though I regularly set aside the theme as others take priority at the easel, I have yet to feel that I’m done with the subject. Kevin haunts me and there’s no getting away from him. Over the past weeks new ideas about the anchorite saint and the trusting little hen-blackbird have again been absorbing me. I’ll be posting shortly about new paintings that are in development, and in preparation for those, today I’ve compiled a series of images by other artists and illustrators… found during a trawl of Google…  who’ve been drawn to the story.  Wherever possible I’ve attributed the artists.

…

Saint Kevin and the Blackbird in a 13th century manuscript.

…

Saint Kevin’s Bird by Leo Higgins.

…

Artist unknown.

…

Artist unknown.

…

…

Two images of Saint Kevin by printmaker Catherine Ryan.

…

Illustration by Doug Montross.

…

Aviaries by Yvonne C. Murphy, with a cover image taken from my Saint Kevin and the Blackbird painting Paper Garden.

…

Paper Garden

2011 – Acrylic on Panel – 31 x 63 cms

Private Collection

one from the archive

In 2006 I was asked to design a cover for a brochure to be published in celebration of fifty years of Gwent Young People’s Theatre. As a young teenager I’d belonged  to the group, though back then it had been called Monmouthshire Young People’s Theatre. I was pleased to be asked to play a part in the anniversary of a theatre group that had been so significant in my life, and I gladly agreed. The work, which is a collage,  has been taped to the wall of my studio ever since, familiar to the point where it had become rather invisible to me.

…

However, for some unknown reason today it caught my eye, and I realised with a jolt that what at the time had seemed to be a one-off, in fact marked the beginning of much that was to follow by way of book design. I post it here with some affection. It was clearly an arrow pointing in the direction of future exploration!

…

…

writes in the dust on tour

…

The wonderful thing about the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art is that its trustees are tirelessly inventive and proactive in getting it seen. Frankly they put to shame the curators of some our great institutions, where the stacks overflow with works stored and forgotten for decades. Last week I had an e-mail from the ceramist Crispin Owen, who sent images of Christ Writes in the Dust at the University of  Central Lancashire, where selected works from the Methodist Collection are currently being shown. (Crispin helped set up and hang the UCLan exhibition.) This is I think the third venue… there may have been more that I missed… that the painting has appeared at since it was loaned by the Methodist Collection to my retrospective at The National Library of Wales last year, so Christ and the adulterous woman have been putting plenty of miles under their belts.

…

I find it most heartening to know that there are innovative ways of getting paintings out and into the world to be seen by many, and the Trustees of the Methodist Collection could give seminars on how to do it! This is the most splendid example of a magnificent collection being used to rewrite the book on ‘outreach’. My thanks to Crispin for sending the above image.

…

…

The exhibition runs from 23 June – 18 July at St Peter’s Art Centre, Preston. From there it moves on to the Central Hall, Westminster, where it may be seen from 28 July – 9 September. Included in it are works by Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra, Eric Gill, Patrick Heron, Elizabeth Frink, Jaques Iselin, Georges Rouault, Craigie Aitchison, and of course, me.

the penguin comes-a-calling

…

It was a surprise of the best sort last week when an e-mail dropped into my inbox from the Picture Editor for Penguin Press, Isabelle de Cat,  requesting that I contact her with regard to a forthcoming addition to the Penguin Modern Classic imprint. (The title under discussion has long been published by Penguin, but after many years between the same covers, it was thought high time for a change of livery.) Things got even better this week when Isabelle wrote with news that at their ‘cover’ meeting, the team had decided to go with my image, and she’d be sending me the proposed lay-out before long. That has since arrived. It’s been beautifully done, though I fear I must keep you in suspense for a while yet before I can reveal it here. All in good time.

I had thought that perhaps John Coulthart’s recent use of a couple of my Mari Lwyd drawings reinvented as ‘imagined’ Penguin Modern Classics covers for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, had been the spur to Penguin approaching me, but in fact the connection had come from elsewhere. All that may be said on the matter for the present, is that I grew up on Penguin, and so this is quite a thrill for me.

To illustrate this post without giving anything away, here are some spreads from Phil Baines’ engaging book Penguin by Design:

  …

 …

 

…

…

alphabet animals

…

I offer a little inspiration today for those considering joining in at the Artlog with the forthcoming exhibition themed to the alphabet, which we’ve called Alphabet Soup. The notion for  the exhibition came about when I was regularly posting images from my own Alphabet Primer, and Shellie Byatt suggested that the theme of ‘Alphabets’ might prove to be a popular follow-up open exhibition to the one we did about ‘Maquettes’. You can read the ‘Call for Submissions’ for the alphabet exhibition, HERE. Shellie and another Artlog regular, Lucy Kempton, will be jointly organising and curating the exhibition.  I do hope that many of you will unleash your creativity on this little project, and that visitors to the Artlog will be rewarded with exciting new typographies and alphabet primers.

…

Anita Mills sent me the gift of a book titled  Gone Wild: an endangered animal alphabet. It’s by David McLimans and is published by Walker & Company, New York. I’ve taken some photographs of the book to get you thinking about letters in new ways.

…

U is for Bald-Headed Ukari

…

M is for Prairie Sphinx Moth

…

V is for Baluchistan Vole

…

W is for Ethiopian Wolf

…

R is for Black Rhinoceros

…

…

Endpapers from Gone Wild

…

“AND NOW” cried Max….

… “LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!”

…

“I think what I’ve offered was different. But not because I drew better than anybody, or wrote better than anybody, but because I was more honest than anybody. And in the discussion of children, and the lives of children, and the fantasies of children, and the language of children, I said anything I wanted, because I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe there’s a demarcation of “you mustn’t tell them this, you mustn’t tell them that.” You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true, you tell them.”

Maurice Sendak. 1928 – 2012