Picturing Grin and his characters

Graphic artist Oksana Heilyk’s illustrations to Grin’s works are on display at the exhibition (Grin, born as Aleksandr S. Grinevsky, was a famous Romantic Realist novelist, although he regarded himself a Symbolist).

The works she has visualized include the famous novel Scarlet Sails and a lesser-known short story Wild Rose. The author’s modest house has been drawn too. The exhibited illustrations were published in Grin’s Selected Works in 2012. By the way, this collection includes unfinished novel Touch-me-not.

Heilyk’s desire to create drawings based on Grin’s tales is no accident. The writer and the artist share admiration for the Crimea. Heilyk’s drawings cover various places in the peninsula: Chersoneses, Cape Fiolent, Stary Krym, while the Grin Trail from Stary Krym to Koktebel has got its name from the author’s habit to use it when going on foot to visit Maximilian Voloshin, an artist and poet.

Heilyk has illustrated more than 30 books. Her projects include a series of albums An Art Encyclopedia of Historic Places that contains about 700 views of Kyiv, Lviv, Lutsk, Odesa, Chernihiv, and Donetsk cityscapes as well as Crimean landscapes executed in old-fashioned grisaille technique, and another series of albums entitled The Ports of the World. Heilyk won the Best Book of the Year Award and Award for Contribution to the Development of the Book.