Master Ilya Bogdesko

Ilya Bogdesko,a prominent master of the art of calligraphy, has visited the International Exhibition of Calligraphy today, where he could study the exhibits and meet his colleagues.

“Nature often endows man with a gift of perceiving the beautiful. Some of us strive for music, others – for painting, ballet or architecture. And there dwell those who can appreciate the beauty of a letter. Their dream world is that of calligraphy”, Master said.

Ilya Bogdesko is the People’s Artist of the USSR and full member of the Russian Academy of Arts. He is the winner of a number of national and international awards and prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Award (for his illustrations for Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”).

Master Bogdesko studies the exhibits and meets his colleagues

One of the most precious exhibits of the International Exhibition of Calligraphy is a book with a sequence of 33 illustrations for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which took Ilya Bogdesko five years to accomplish. This sequence of engraving prints renders the art principles and mature mastership of the artist. In his Don Quixote illustrations, Ilya Bogdesko managed to portray the grandiose personalities of the characters.

Master Bogdesko studying the exhibits and meeting his colleagues.

His sixty-year creative advancement was predominantly devoted to illustrations for Moldavian, Russian and world classical literary works: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Swift, Cervantes, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Cooper, etc.

At the same time, he tried his hand at painting, monumental art and succeeded in calligraphy.

Ilya Bogdesko

"Illustrating classic books is an unusual, complicated, and important part of the graphics arts. The artist designing the books of famous writers, whose works are included into ′the golden literature repository of humankind′, must equal their deep message with high quality calligraphic form. Such work requires not only high professional skills and a rare gift of imagination (It’s really hard to render the famous characters recognizable, avoiding imitations of any of former images!) but also a certain strength of spirit liberating the calligrapher from the vicious circle of vanity and enabling her to feel the vibrating eternity on the pen′s nib."

Master Bogdesko studying the exhibits and meeting his colleagues

Source: International Exhibition of Calligraphy