Fairytale characters will live at the Workshop Art Center for a while

Halyna Zinko’s exhibition “Picture Book” will run in Kharkiv until January 19. The young artist has already illustrated over 50 books, many of them published abroad, too. The organizers told The Day that Zinko’s art involved more than just a new take on familiar characters. She created up-to-date and highly sophisticated graphic comments to the works by authors including Stefan Zweig, James Fenimore Cooper, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Andrei Makarevich, and Aleksandr Vasilyev.

The artist creates her paintings using the techniques of linocut (linoleum engraving) and watercolor, adding the smallest details with help of computer. At first glance, it seems that her paintings are surrealist. Zinko points out: “The main character of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland famously said: ‘What is the use of a book without pictures?’ Most kids would probably agree. Therefore, I want kids to like fairytales, to find them fun to read and look at the illustrations. I am now creating the characters that I would have been glad to see in my childhood.”

Exhibition at the Workshop Art Center is dedicated to Christmas holidays and saturated with sorcery and memories of childhood. It displays illustrations to fairytales Thumbelina, Little Red Riding Hood, Scarlet Flower, Doves’ Story, Frosia, Confectionery Stories, and The Snow Queen, most of them being exhibited for the first time. By the way, besides illustrating books, Zinko tried her hand in the cartoon art as well.