This post is dedicated to a talented drawer from Saint Petersburg: Irina Vinnik. She is a contemporary artist who likes to work with drawing, ink and digital tools. The image of today belongs to a series called Call up old memories. All the works are related with organic elements, curves and spirals that interweave each other. They are drawn with ink and pencil over an ocher paper, just like the composition were an ancient work. There are also secondary elements as words and frames, with classic typographies or handmade ones, as the sign of the work and the date.
I have chosen particularly this image because I have found a clear reference from one of my favourite artists: M. C. Escher. Irina has taken two lizards in the same way as Escher did. The lizards are related by curves in a sort of symmetrical composition. While Escher composed the reptiles transforming the organic lines into geometrical ones in a kind of mathematical limit, Irina prefers to work only with organic elements, only with curved lines.
Another reference I found in the composition is the parallelism with Celtic knots. In those knots the curve lines interweaved just like Irina does with the curves that born from the lizard’s bodies.
Also I want to propose another reference: the Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. They contains a main element (in this case the two lizards) and a lot of handmade writings. It’s just like Irina wanted to evoke those Renaissance treatises.
Looking at the typographical words: Notes, October, Monday, Tuesday, Wednsday, Saturday, we may think this is a page that belongs to a diary, a journal where the artist fix her work in a concrete date. It would be interesting to understand the handmade writings around the image, but they are very little to be read. Surely they give information about this work.
Finally to note that Irina signs the image in the lower left side of the drawing and includes some numbers that I really don´t know their meaning. She also writes her email, this suggests she wants to interact with the observer, to know what he thinks. I should send this post to Irina for she to know my background. You can do it as well to irina@vinnik.net.
Heresy and Beauty 