Gennady Kalinovsky

 

Mary Poppins illustrated by Gennady Kalinovsky (1929 - 2006) published in 1968. This is a more complete library of the illustrations from this book which I featured last year. It is interesting to see such an incredible and unique version of Mary Poppins when you are so used to the visual language of Mary Shepard.

Gennady Kalinovsky II

"Let the child not always understand everything, but even incomprehensible things excite him, provoke his imagination. The thing is, do you know what this book is about? About the entry of a little person into the bizarre world of adult life, where, as it seems, by someone's whimsical, impudent will, the absurd, meaning, meanness, heroism, and sometimes just living are mixed, like in compote - in a word, our life. We, adults, live in it, but do not notice miracles. But for a child, everything is a discovery. And he perceives "miracles" naturally, as something self-evident." Gennady Kalinovsky

"L. Carroll's book, in my opinion, is not a fairy tale. A fairy tale is devoid of paradox, a fairy tale has a solid ethical basis, its plot is wandering. In any case, "Alice" is not a folk tale, but rather a folk versification. This is the first. The second is a kind of novel from the life of paradoxes. The third is, perhaps, a parody of a traditional mathematician, such as Carroll, on the provisions of the new non-Euclidean mathematics, towhich, as is well known, Professor Dodgson treated very ironically (but, as mathematicians told me, the parody involuntarily grew into its opposite, that is, into an affirmation of the positions of the addressee of the irony). I did not feel this aspect of the book well, because I am not on good terms with higher mathematics, and simply took his word for it.

Fourthly, the book is written in the key of a visionary sense of being, like a dream.

All this had to be taken into account and drawn, keeping in mind all four positions."

Gennady Kalinovsky

“I illustrated the book for about a year and a half, but, to be honest, I didn’t pick up a pencil for about a year of that time: I was constantly ‘playing’ the drawings in my mind.”

Gennady Kalinovsky 

Gennady Kalinovsky I

 

In the 1960's endpapers blog post is the endpaper of Mary Poppins, illustrated by Gennady Kalinovsky (1929-2006) published in1968, brought to my attention by Katya Tabakh. The line quality, humour and joy of this book is sublime no wonder Katya became an illustrator after having this book as a child.  There is so much detail and beauty in every illustration even down to the weeds pushing through the paving stones. 

Gennady Vladimirovich Kalinovsky (September 1, 1929, Stavropol - March 5, 2006, Moscow)  was a Russian artist, a master of book illustration.

He began to draw early, from two or three years old, then the art circle of the House of Pioneers, the head of which, noticing the talented boy, advised him to send his works to the competition. In 1943"The work "The Fall of the Nibelungs" won first prize in the drawing competition of the newspaper "Pionerskaya Pravda", and the fourteen year old Gennady received a recommendation to study at the Moscow Secondary Art School. After school, the Gennady went on to study at the Surikov Art Institute, in the graphics department. During his studies, both at school and at the institute, he lived in a boarding school, he was known as unsociable, always on his own."

"A drawing cannot be constructed. After all, an artistic image is a spontaneously arising idea with a certain degree of clarity. It is strange: an image is not an observation, not a memory, not an invention, not a mechanical alloy of some details and not a plot find. An impulsive movement, the so-called creative impulse, grows and spills out inside the artist... This is the basis of everything.

Where construction begins, art ends. Of course, there are some "ready-made blocks", developments and principles. But art is something that is without blanks... A flash of a match in a dark room. If you see it, it means that conception has taken place, the baby will definitely be born. The image is the basis of any work. Everything else, as they say, is a superstructure.

After all, culture is just the cultivation of something. Culture is a system of fixed knowledge. Culture is a school, a tradition, a system... But not art, no. Therefore, the artist must run away from culture. After all, he is in himself, he is unique and does not need anything... "

Gennady Kalinovsky