The Art of Old Artists as a Source of Inspiration in the Bookplates by Konstantin Kalinovich

Abstract

Konstantin Yuryevich Kalinovich (b. 1959), an artist and illustrator who demonstrates exclusive techniques and a high degree of detail in the field of printed graphics, is the owner of a large number of international awards, prestigious art prizes and the title of Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers of the United Kingdom (1992). K.Yu. Kalinovich’s professionalism is also convincingly manifested in small forms — in the art of ex-libris. The artist’s formation as an etcher began in the Leningrad period of his studies in the experimental lithographic workshop of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering under the guidance of G.P. Pakharevsky, and then continued at the Faculty of Graphics of the Ivan Fyodorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute. The creative heritage of A. Brunovsky and personal acquaintance with the Slovak master had a great influence on the formation of the individual graphic style. The artist’s bookplates, made in etching, are often homages in memory of old masters: the images created by H. Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, A. Dürer, H. Avercamp, J. Vermeer, and Rembrandt excite and inspire him to visual interpretation. The chosen range of artistic means is miniature, synthesis, printmaking as an independent expression of ex-libris. The technique is etching, less often watercolor, gouache. The type is a plot bookplate with the preserved function of belonging to a private library and the implementation of the customer’s idea. To the depth, picturesqueness and wide tonal range of etching, the artist adds original technical features: a dial from an old clock is selected as an etching board, and details of the clock mechanism are involved in the image base, correcting and warping the format and field of the etching with blind impressions. The plot echoing with the great artists and the meticulous thoroughness of K.Yu. Kalinovich’s technique generate original stories about the joy and pain of being, framed by a high form of appreciation for the art of the past. In the works of Kalinovich, the involvement in the composed metaphysical world, the visual images of which are fantastically realistic, monstrously attractive and historically filled, is clearly accentuated. The homage to the old artists’ art in Kalinovich’s bookplates is his world, forcing the viewers to reach for a magnifying glass so as not to miss a single line, while mastering the knowledge of the world art history.