LAB #3(42) 2008

always offer some background, some story. It was Lewis Carroll who spoke through Alice and asked, what the use of a book without pictures was, and when a single picture has a whole story with all the details, then any text will be accepted. Certainly, an illustration in a magazine implies that there should be certain diplomacy involved, but at the same time Tkach has a tendency to experiment. He sees him- self both an illustrator and a designer; lines, textures, shades – all these are interesting to him, because he believes that the fountain of ideas in the world of illustrations these days is akin to a refreshing stream, offering inspiration to contemporary artists. Which means, anything can serve as a subject for his works, whether it is Brezhnev, old men, zoomor- phic people (or are they antropomorphic animals?), money, video, experiments, anything. Any element of culture outlined with a pen and filled with local colour assumes both some weight and the restless charm of distortion.

Valentin Tkach_the charm of distor- tion | Graphic Valentin Tkach | Text Eugenia Bakhturova | Valentin Tkach is rather easily given to conversation, but he is modest in a way a real artist should be. He does not tell a lot about himself; he first learned to be a ceramist, later he entered the Poligraph (the University of publishing), the one that yielded the majority of the team working for the “How” magazine – the most well-known published project about graphic design. That is, our protagonist has been trained appropriately. Then he worked for a design studio, and then he worked as a freelancer for such well-known magazines as Kom- mersant, Playboy, Bolshoy Gorod and many others. So it looks like he has been quite successful in his career. The interest art directors of many titles have in Valentin is easy to explain; his illustrations based on the mixture of manual and computer graphics

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