Sta.sh
Иван Яковлевич Билибин, or for those who can't read the cyrylic alphabet: Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, was one of the most important illustrators and stage designers in Eastern Europe of the 20th century.
Education and inspirations
From 1902 to 1904 he travelled around Russian North. He became fairly inspired by the folklore of these areas, as well as by its architecture; he noted his collected impressions and described them in a monograph entitled Folk Arts of the Russian North. As you can probably notice by his works, he was also influenced by Japanese prints and Art Nouveau.
Illustrations and design
Later on, during the Russian Revolution of 1905 he painted revolutionary cartoons. Bilibin also worked as a stage designer for a number of Russian operas and plays, of which the most famous one was The Golden Cockerel produced by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
10 years of homesickness
In Leningrad, he accepted an offer to be a lecturer in the Soviet Academy of Arts and he worked there until 1941, when the great Siege of Leningrad started. He didn't survive the deadly 872 days of the siege - Ivan Bilibin died on the 7th of February 1942, 5 months after it started.
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