Once laura was the name for the indigo paint extracted from a tropical leguminous plant. In ancient times, victors who won over their rivals in a battle were decorated with a laurel branch. And it is not accidental that this year Kostiantyn Lavro, who has worked for many years in the sphere of book illustration, has became a winner of Shevchenko Prize for his illustrations to the works of Ukrainian literature classics and monumental paintings with the themes taken from Ukrainian folk fairy tales in Kyiv’s Academic Puppet Theater.
Today the artist’s oeuvre includes dozens of books, which have been published not only in Ukraine, but also in the countries of Europe and America. These include 100 Best Ukrainian Folk Fairy Tales (volumes 1,2), Nich pered Rizdvom (The Night Before Christmas) by Mykola Hohol, Rizdviana rukavychka (Christmas Glove), Pan Kotsky (Sir Cat-o-Puss), Abetka (Alphabet), etc. These books can be justly called a sort of A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA Publishing House’s calling card. They are unique and their styling is inimitable. The books featuring illustrations by Lavro break the stereotypical concept of publications for the youngest readers.
This can be proved with one example — Alphabet, a book for preschoolers that has been republished many times and still enjoys immense demand on the children’s literature market. Over 30 colorful illustrations to every letter of the alphabet, with a witty plot and striking images that are instantly memorized by children, prompt them to associative thinking.
Telling about his maturation as an illustrator of children’s books, Lavro recalls his school years, years of studies at the Republican Taras Shevchenko School of Arts in Kyiv. Lavro is especially grateful to his first teachers, Lina Steblovska and Yevhen Zviezdov, who essentially determined his future. Somewhat later, already a student of the Ukrainian Institute of Printing in Lviv, Lavro considered Ivan Ostafiichuk and Feodosii Humeniuk, outstanding artists in the domain of graphic arts and painting, to be his mentors. Their works in the late 1970s and the early 1980s had an immense impact on him, encouraging him to seek his own artistic style.
Practice shows that when mastering any craft, everyone has to imitate more experienced masters at the beginning. Similarly, Lavro, being a student at the institute of printing, was improving his artistic mastery by copying the renowned graphic artists’ manner. At the same time, he was an unmatched drawer among his peers. His natural talents, developed in an art school, lent ease to the academic drawings he created throughout his student years.
However, the skills obtained in the educational establishment of arts appeared insufficient when Lavro, already a graduate specialist, started to work in the magazine Barvinok. Now he had to learn in practice the art of thinking figuratively — something without which no genuine artwork can emerge.
“Many people are mistaken, considering illustrating children’s publications an unserious, light business,” LAVRO says. “The genre of book illustration will always be in demand, because when illustrating a writer’s book, the artist seems to give second life to it. And the artist is really successful in his work, when his illustrations, compared with a prose or poetic work, are equally valuable in terms of imagery, presence of plot and the depth with which the topic is revealed.”
Lavro’s artistic career features numerous cases when a creative tandem of a writer and an artist emerged. Suffice it to mention one of the first books he illustrated, a collection of prose works by the master of contemporary Ukrainian literature Vasyl Shevchuk or the Mykola Vinhranovsky’s book of poetry, which was published by the A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA Publishing House.
The illustrations to various publications are convincing proof that the artist has no difficulties in revealing the book’s themes. Above all, he achieves this owing to the gallery of images he created and masterly incorporated into the composition of graphic works. For example, in the abridged Ukrainian translation of Mykola Hohol’s The Night Before Christmas (The Night Facing Christmas) made by Maksym Rylsky and published by A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA several years ago, the artist depicts with tender love the Ukrainian villages’ coloring, the magic of surrounding nature, the village folkways and architecture. All the characters in the book — Vakula, Oksana, Chub, Solokha, Patsiuk, Tsarine, and a devil — seem to be living on the book’s pages. Their emotions, in their mimicry and gestures, are shown by the artist with subtlety and ruin the stereotypic concept that illustrations are static. Here every dash line is dynamic, and therefore the plots are lively and full of spirit. In order to reinforce the readers’ perception of the images in graphic pictures, Lavro wittingly violates the human body proportions, achieving some grotesquerie in the characters’ appearance. His imagination is boundless, and so if you give each illustration a close look, you will discover nice details: Hohol’s portrait in the icon, covered with embroidered rushnyks, in which he is in the typical pose of Cossack Mamai; the sharp nose of Deacon, looking as if he had opened a sack and is peeing out of it, goggle-eyed Patsiuk with sour cream on his moustache.
The artist admits that working on the book The Night before Christmas took especial scrupulosity and patience, for many corrections to illustrations were brought in by Ivan Malkovych, who carefully studied the smallest nuances of graphic pictures. For example, the artist had to remake Solokha’s image several times, in order to achieve an acceptable interpretation of this heroine. Neither did the book’s cover satisfy him in the process of working. Only after the illustrator picked up the font authored by renowned graphic Vasyl Chabanyk, the cover began to “sparkle.” Not only children but also adults liked The Night Before Christmas as soon as the book saw the light.
It is hard to believe, but while creating illustrations Lavro applies no modern computer technologies whatsoever in his work. However, this does not mean that he is not aware of the advantages of electronic images, which are widely represented in brightly illustrated comic books and fashion and music journals. However, traditional illustrations executed in oils, gouache, and ink are preferred.
Lavro is one of the few Ukrainian artists who regularly receive orders from foreign publishing houses, such as the French Bayard Press, Swiss Calligram, and American Alfred A. Knopf. The publications featuring his illustrations, Le Noel du Grand Loup in France, The Cat and the Rooster in the US, Le Carnaval in Switzerland were a success, selling in many copies and were several times republished.
Explaining the successes of his work, the artist joked, or perhaps he was serious in telling this, that the reason is in the difference between the Ukrainian and foreign artists.
“When a Ukrainian master creates a graphic work, the latter is born through creative endeavors and soul torments,” LAVRO noted, “whereas it is vice versa about foreigners: without any hesitation, the images emerge in an easy and simple way. Perhaps, we have this kind of mentality: always to suffer. Nothing worthy can come out without this.”
After many years of working experience of a graphic artist Lavro has formed a clear concept of the general artistic level of books recently published by various Ukrainian publishers.
In his opinion, the negative processes in book publishing are caused above all by the fact that publishers are geared for quick profits and disregard the quality of illustrations. Besides, the level of preparation in art institutes has dropped lately, compared with the qualification achieved by students in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Comparing the works of contemporary graphic artists, united around the A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA, with illustrations created by the older and renowned masters of graphic art, such as Anatolii Bazylevych, Vasyl Lopata, Serhii Yakutovych, and Mykola Stratilat, one can make a conclusion: they are all perfect masters of the drawing technique, and all have figurative vision. Books illustrated by Kostiantyn Lavro, Vladyslav Yerko, Oleksii Kolesnykov, Kateryna Shtanko, Sofia Us, Viktoria Palchun, Oleh Petrenko-Zanevsky, and Volodymyr Kharchenko may without hesitation be included in the “golden fund” of the Ukrainian book graphics.
It is not accidental that the works of these masters win awards at prestigious international book exhibits and fairs. In particular, Lavro’s illustrations have won in competitions in Bologna (Italy), Bratislava (Slovakia), and Tehran (Iran). In 2005, the artist received the Lesia Ukrainka Award from Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers in the nomination “Illustration of Books for Children” for his illustrations to the publications, The Night before Christmas by Mykola Hohol and Christmas Glove published by A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA.
But the greatest award for the artist is the recognition of his talent by the youngest readers. Every month the publishers receive letters with Lavro’s illustrations copied by children.
“All books by A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA are born in artistic pain, if I may say so,” the artist admitted. “In a sense, I have created the illustrations through many sufferings, because when you have such a publishing director as Ivan Malkovych, you cannot illustrate books offhandedly. He will give an eye everything critically, missing no dot. Therefore, I try to meet all of his requirements.
“Sometimes I am asked, How did you manage to invent and depict on paper so peculiar characters, build the composition, and select the illustration colors that are in harmony with each other? I don’t even know how to answer this kind of questions. Perhaps, the divine providence is guiding my hand.”
One can only rejoice that in our time, marked with a sort of public apathy and increasing indifference, there are people who continue to confirm through their work the faith in beauty typical of genuine pictorial art. Lavro and the likeminded artists who have helped Ukrainian books to win world recognition also belong to this cohort of creative people.
