Russian born illustrator Gennady Spirin studied at the Moscow Art School and the Academy of Arts, as well as the Moscow Stroganov Institute, and currently resides in the U.S.
Spirin is the author and illustrator of a number of children’s books for which his illustrations have garnered awards in Europe and the U.S.
Spirin blends imagery and painting styles from the Renaissance with a modern design sensibility, and, to my eye, seasons it with influences from great turn of the 20th Century illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, Kay Neilsen and Howard Pyle.
His meticulously detailed images are muted in color, rich with texture and marvelously evocative of other times and places. They often combine pictorial and decorative elements, in a way suggestive of both the Renaissance and Art Nouveau artists like Alphonse Mucha (also bringing to mind Russian illustrator Ivan Bilibin). There is a quality of finesse and attention to pictorial unity that gives Spirin’s paintings a quiet strength, drawing you in and guiding your eye through through the composition.
His work can have a feeling of timelessness, as though it was situated outside the stream of time and plucking elements from it at will.
(As a side note, it occurs to me that contemporary illustrators like Olga Dugina and Andrej Dugan may have been influenced by Spirin.)
Unfortunately I don’t know of a definitive repository of Spirin’s work on the web, or an official site, but I’ve gathered what resources I could find for you below.
[Suggestion courtesy of Don Green]
Addendum: another good resource was added to the list in the form of this blog post, with several of Spirin’s illustrations; which was found for us by Tat, who searched for Spirin’s name in Russian. (See this post’s comments.)
