Bilibin, standing, with his wife & friends in France. Late 1920s (from Ivan Bilibin by Sergey Golynets, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1981)
Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, artist and illustrator and member of Mir Isskustva (The World of Art group), drew inspiration for his book illustrations from the folk art of his native Russia, as well as from Renaissance woodcuts, Japanese prints and the Russian lubok. His illustrated fairytales succeed in fusing small-scale patterns, the fine finish of details and the bright colouring characteristic of seventeenth-century Russian art.
Bilibin said ‘For me, generally speaking, fairy tales, bylinas, and hymns are bound up together with embroidery, printed patterns on cloths, wood carvings, folk architecture, folk pictures, and so forth…’. In his illustrations, he created a magical world which drew from all of these sources.
Born near St Petersburg in 1876, Bilibin lived in Russia until the tumultuous years following the revolution when he left as a refugee for Egypt. He travelled and worked in the Middle East and Europe but longed for his homeland, returning to work there in 1936. He died in the winter of 1942 during the siege of Leningrad, having refused evacuation and was buried in a communal grave.
Erast Binyashevsky
Erast Binyashevsky was a Ukrainian doctor who became fascinated by the folk art found on decorated eggs known as pysanky in the different regions of Ukraine. During the 1960s he travelled widely across the country collecting and illustrating a large series of designs for the hundreds of different regional pysanky. A small number of his designs were published in a book ‘The Ukrainian Pysanka’ in 1968 and subsequently in many different publications. Pysanky are made using wax-resist techniques and the designs are highly symbolised; their origins stretch back hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Uzbek Ikat
The art of ikat (known locally as abr bandi or ‘cloud weaving’) reached its height in nineteenth-century Central Asia. Complex patterns were drawn onto silk threads and then the threads were gathered, tied, wax-resist dyed, dried and untied repeatedly until the whole pattern was revealed. Only at this point were the threads woven together on a loom, which accounts for the glorious smudging of colours as the threads were jostled about prior to weaving. The textiles were highly prized and used in clothes, bedding, wall-hangings, animal trappings and other accessories. In the city of Bukhara by the end of the 19th century there were over 12,000 wooden machines for making handmade fabrics and it is here that ikat weaving reached its peak. The skill, time and patience involved and the sheer exuberance of the patterns and colour combinations are very arresting to the contemporary eye.