On the aesthetics of cursive fonts

Calligraphy is called music for the eyes, and the Artist Gallery in Kyiv is now filled with this visual sound. The Honored Artist of Ukraine, Assistant Professor of Graphic Art at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, graphic artist and calligrapher Vitalii Mitchenko is holding his own 60th anniversary exhibition there.

The gallery is displaying 30 works the master has created over the past five years. These include font sheets, jobbing type projects, artwork and calligraphy pieces for Lesia Ukrainka’s Forest Song, custom postcards and pages of the famous handwritten copy of Viy. Sculptures by the Honored Artist of Ukraine Alisa Zaboi supplement the calligraphic composition. Mitchenko asked the sculptor to select 15 works she created over years which depict evangelical and biblical women, as well as works from the series Land in the Morning, Land in The Daytime and Land Asleep.

The exhibition is well attended by Mitchenko’s students, including former ones who are now artists in their own right. “I am very pleased to have worked with Mitchenko,” said the President of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine Andrii Chebykin. “We have created a lot of good books together, as I was responsible for illustrations, while he designed layout and fonts.” By the way, Mitchenko’s achievements in the field of book design won him over 20 diplomas and other awards at national and international book competitions. According to Chebykin, Mitchenko went beyond skillfully applying historical calligraphy, including Cossack cursive, as he found his own way to do fonts, a peculiar approach and outlook.

The graphic artist Mykola Kochubei, Mitchenko’s former student, recalled: “In my student years, we learned fonts designed by foreign scholars and practitioners only, but now we have a robust Ukrainian tradition that deserves to be emulated.” Another brilliant representative of the national font design tradition Vasyl Chebanyk noted the exceptional importance of this exhibition, because handwritten works are exhibited only infrequently in Ukraine. “Ukrainian handwriting art is now dormant,” Chebanyk said, “even though the art is popular elsewhere in Europe, it is in high demand, there are schools, clubs, international triennials and biennales, as well as artists who earn good money practicing it.” According to Mitchenko, Ukrainian handwriting art has experienced some progress over the past years, primarily thanks to the annual calligraphy festivals Ruthenia in Kyiv and Cyrillic Feast in Kharkiv which aim to display the nation’s achievements in font design and encourage young people to enter the profession. Mitchenko is already preparing a new series of easel calligraphy pieces and art books involving highly artistic cursive fonts for the coming festivals. After all, it is an established truth that the culture of the font is a necessary part of the book culture, while the latter is a necessary part of the national culture as a whole.