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Konstantin ZVEZDOCHETOV


EPHEMERIS

 PRINTING CRAFTS AND FANCY CRANKS.

200 copies of «Ephemeris» by Konstantin Zvezdochetov have been printed by practically home-made means in 1990 in a mythical «Dablus» publishing house. Drawbacks of the printing process were corrected manually, in almost the same manner like two hundred years ago hand-made books were produced by low-browed Old Believers by the light of a splinter. The artist’s style reminds of Russian folk painting: decorative details abound, and fairy tale subjects mingle with reality to form graphic ornament; the author himself describes ideal society in the manner of modern primitivism, and his portrait is silhouette-cut by a folk artist on an Odessa seafront. «Ephemeris» is a typical product of modern art, which focuses the experience of folk crafts: from the subject itself (self-made books) to the style of the author, K. Zvezdochetov, a conceptual neoprimitivist.

Leonid Tishkov
Lubok:
there are two possible origins of this word. First, roving traders (ofenyas) carried printed pictures in back-packs made of splint, and second, initially luboks were printed using lime tree boards, which in days of old was called lub. The wood of lime trees is soft, and a board would sustain only 200-300 prints, so later they started printing luboks from copper plates. Luboks were printed in Moscow usually (already in the 18th century there were more than 20 printing houses there), and to be painted, luboks were taken to the villages of Nikolskoye and Izmailovo near Moscow.