 I. ABOUT THE ARTIST
FONT AND CALLIGRAPHY are, by far, the main field in creative work and teaching for Petr P. Chobitko. He does not perceive it as a field of abstract luxurious art but, first of all, as setting and resolution of the task of font and calligraphy penetration into human life. The modern life pace and its low-quality visual information background follow us day by day and virtually seizes everybody, from small to big ones, becoming the reason for stress, depression and mental disorders increasingly more often, i.e. the reason for all that contributes to gradual deterioration of human personality. That’s why the problem of personal integrity, its self-preservation and development, starting from school, normal successful studies at high school and further active creative and spiritual life are now possible in close contact with calligraphy only. Calligraphy studies contribute to stronger mental status of a child, encourage work of its conscience, adjust the emotional sphere, and create conditions for development of fine movements of the hand and successful preparation in any line of activities. For an adult, calligraphy studies serve as an excellefnt protection against stress, being a means of relaxation and are also a powerful driver of creative potential development and strengthening.
Technical advances, in particular tfhe computer era, gradually separated a man from calligraphy. Most people have lost any desire not only to have clear and beautiful handwriting but even unlearned to see and appreciate the true harmony of letters, so they use it, without being aware of the true meaning.
Yet a letter is not a frozen dead pattern but a real life image that, in its modern embodiment, like with the human genome, accumulated and concentrated all stages of the humankind development and is one of the most important aspects of history of its spiritual and substantial culture. It is more than just a means of information storage and transmission, a means that secures the most reliable link between people and the whole historic eras, but also the field of the finest emotional and psychological feelings, high fantasy flights, expressed via refined plastic of letters and virtuous dash.
That’s why, being an artist and a teacher, Petr Chobitko believe that one of his main objectives is to inculcate love for and understanding of the art of the font and calligraphy to his pupils, as required for their true professionalism. He also seeks to retrieve interest, attention and respect of our letter traditions and the image origin of letter, its sacral nature, to our everyday life.
Such master can be righteously called with an undeservedly forgotten work of calligrapher. This term has been applied to those who mastered the laws of sign birth since long ago.
Creative works by Petr P. Chobitko have been introduced to a wide range of spectators in Ukraine, the Baltics and non-CIS states since mid-1970’s.
Works by the artist, no matter how paradoxical it might seem, were more frequently exhibited at international private views and Biennale than at all-USSR exhibitions. They were exhibited in Bulgaria, Poland, Syria, Finland, Czech Republic, France, U.S.A. and the Baltic Biennale. His works are kept in museums and collection of Tallinn, Kyiv, Warsaw and New York.
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II. ARTIST’S CREATIVE WORKS:
Posters.
As early as in his student’s years, Petr Chobitko was fond of studying complicated font-related problems, in addition to performing work in purely graphic techniques, in its close relation to the poster art on which he spent much time in his creative works. Poster is a special language and a special area of the font art, which requires that an artist does not only have good technique but also in-depth, true understanding of a social event, the essence of which should not only be ‘retrieved’ from the depth of an event but precisely reflected using the minimum artistic means. The artist worked on political and socio-cultural posters. Whereas he often dropped font in political posters, the artist included the necessary information in socio-cultural posters not infrequently.
Here is a poster timed to Pablo Picasso’s anniversary: the focus is on Picasso’s portrait made in pen and ink. There is font near the portrait, which originally combined the portrait itself and a fragment of the artist’s paintings in a free and broad manner typical of Picasso.
Book: Dante etc.
Fonts.
A calligrapher’s versatile creative personality is a sort of beau ideal for Petr Chobitko. It is not by chance that the limits of font cannons proved to be too narrow to him. By studying many of the existing calligraphy forms and systems thoroughly, P. Chobitko created a series of original fonts, in which the cannon requirements and the author’s free creative though co-exist. It concerns, first and foremost, draft fonts to the Divine Comedy, the Baroque ABC and such fonts as Narbut, Scythian, Frying Pan, Baudelaire etc. In these works, the artist showed excellent expressiveness of new fonts, displayed the ways for consolidation of calligraphic rules and standards generated over ages and the creative will of individual author.
Both the poster and the book design are determined, first of all, by quality of fonts - the most popular and, consequently, an extremely important type of graphic art. For him, it is both a social history of the sign and a possibility, based on real prototypes, to create new forms that do not exist in the nature.
That’s why the Artist constantly works on the font problems, tries to develop the legacy of classical forms, while carefully treating the restoration of the eternal beauty beau-ideal and creating its own, modern understanding of the classics.
FONT WORK:
Exclusively font works and improvisations by P. Chobitko are ‘pure’ graphics, where the expressiveness of a work of ark is largely based on the plastics of the virgin surface of a sheet of paper, and each stroke of brush, each touch of pen involve the clean flatness into the sign/image birth process.
Technique greatly influences the expressiveness of letters, so the imagery of P. Chobitko’s font work largely relies on the author-selected technique. He uses calligraphic conventional tools willingly – brush, pen, reed stick, writes with ink on paper or silk.
For instance, it is a line, sign outline and exquisite quirk that play the key role in letters written with a pen.
A brush, with its profusive variety of weights and richness of tone reveal the internal plastics of a letter.
For instance, the highest achievements and artistic traditions of calligraphers of Ancient Russia and Ukraine, Western Europe and the East (especially after his Japanese visit and acquaintance with the Japanese calligraphy school) are synthesized in creative work of one master.
In mid-1980’s, the artist was assigned to implement a responsible order - an emblem for the Ukrainian Union of Artists and the Republic House of Artists. Fulfillment of these orders may be largely regarded as a successful socio-artistic experiment. Blueprints of emblems and other font work of the artist were later displayed in the first exhibition of the Soviet font artists in U.S.A. and France (New York, 1985; Paris, 1986).
Literature Museum where he was assigned to perform all artistic and font work on which the main museum decoration concept was based. The font in exposition was the key esthetic pivot that consolidated all of the museum halls and also exhibits collected there and dating back to different times, thus connecting them into the single ensemble. Like a bridge, he connected the past with the present. Opening of this large museum in 1986 became a significant cultural and artistic event for Kiev.
Authors, of whom a majority were and are under the tutelage of Petr Chobitko in the Art School, were engaged in the work. The mere fact of creation of the font artists’ team suggested that a whole team of such specialists, which was unthinkable of just ten years ago, was established in Ukraine.
P. Chobitko elaborated a trademark font that absorbed the best global and national artistic traditions for the museum. The letter proportions have the substantiality of academic Renaissance antiquity; italics elements remind of Kazak shorthand, and typical serifs and letter outlines testify to development of G. Narbut’s font searches on a modern basis. All of these attributes constituted an original artistic phenomenon in Ukraine of the mid-1980’s. Such experiment unambiguously proved the conceptual ability of a font to shape the esthetic environment in a large scale, influence the perception of many people, and thus acted as a manifestation of the synthetic form of public conscience, the name to which is the Art.
CRAYONS, ETCHING:
The Artist is an author of many lyrical landscapes made in crayons and wax pencils. As a rule, none of his exhibitions did without work, in which he used different graphic techniques with great relish. His etchings were displayed in all-Ukrainian exhibitions many times.
In the 1970/1980’s, P. Chobitko experimented extensively, combining high print with deep print (linoleum engraving with etching) in his graphic sheets. The topics of his work are diversified: anti-war work, topical compositions, landscapes and still-lives.
Whereas an artist tries to summarize his own experience of working on the font composition problems in a book or in a poster, his artistic and graphic works reflect his internal experience of communicating with the nature. Both theoretical generalizations and their practical implementation formed a methodical basis for teaching the font art in the Kiev Artistic College School of Graphics where P. Chobitko developed and implemented the subjects of the Basics of Font Composition and the Basics of Font Graphics.
On the example of his teacher, Paul Lukhten, the artist is in constant search for linking the letter with the material, embodying it in different graphic techniques and materials, in his creative work. To perform font compositions, inscriptions on medals, memorial plaques and monuments, he was invited for cooperation by such well-known sculptors and architects as Vassily Boroday, Anatoly Ignaschenko, Ivan Makogon, Mikhail Gritsiuk.
The artist enjoys working in the field of book binding, which he mastered in the Tallinn College. Performing numerous orders for leather binders for books, subscription files and cases, he managed to quicken interest in a number of students, its colleagues, step-by-step and thus laid the foundations to the establishment of the Binding School in the Kiev National Arts Academy, which later contributed to the revival and development of the binding art in Ukraine.
ALTAI CYCLE:
Unquenchable thirst for traveling and cognition of the environment lead the artist to Altai, to the Teletskoye Lake, in 1987. This unusual and unique corner of our motherland will always be one of the most favorite and dear places of the artist’s creative work. Impressed by the inimitable natural beauty and meetings with various people, he returns, again and again, to his pet technique of water colors, crayons, pencil and devotes a large cycle of his artistic, graphic and calligraphic work to this mountain area and its people.
AUTHOR’S COMMENT:
The Letter Image, its qualitative and esthetic aspect, is of extreme importance for a man. The letter image is imprinted in our conscience, by invisibly influencing the finest structures of our mental and emotional sphere; so the power of its influence may prove to be both creative and destructive.
What kind of Image it will be is largely determined by its creator – the upbringing of his artistic and esthetic taste, his education level and, finally, his moral position.
Calligraphy requires many internal efforts, but its fruit is invaluable both for body and the spirit. When you practice calligraphy, your hand acquires the skill of performing the minutest work, and your eye becomes sensitive to details and shades to such extent as to control this process and to notice an error on time, like a good censurer. By overcoming the spiritual idling and the vacancy of thought, you promote the power of observation, the ability to concentrate and to think consistently and logically, which, in turn, helps develop creative thinking and imagination.
Calligraphy practice positively influences mentally and emotionally instable people, helping them make their internality harmonious and recover poise. It is particularly topical in the modern world, with its unrelenting speed, when the destructive pressure of the environment obviously aggravates. To preserve the integrity of the soul and body under these circumstances; each of us needs a potent agent we can make ourselves using a recipe time-tested by the practice of our predecessors.
Through calligraphy, everybody can discover different horizons of both the external environment and one’s internality. If you take a pen and a brush for the first time, it is important to remember the old masters’ maxim: the harder you polish a letter, the harder the letter polishes you.
Extracts from publications on the artist in different periods of his creative work are used:
articles by art critic Victor V. Kostur (Kiev),
extracts from newspaper publications: Moloda Gvardiya 1.03.74r., Zvezda Altaya.
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