Valery Andreyevich Dmitryuk (1940–2020) — artist, illustrator, and caricaturist.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Dmitryuk began his artistic career as a designer at the Ordzhonikidze Aviation Plant after finishing school, while also drawing cartoons for local newspapers.
He graduated from the Faculty of Artistic and Technical Design of Printed Materials at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. For nearly twenty years he worked for the children’s magazine Detskaya Literatura (“Children’s Literature”), where he served as chief artist and member of the editorial board. Dmitryuk also collaborated with other popular Soviet children’s magazines such as Murzilka, Vesyolye Kartinki (“Funny Pictures”), Kolobok, and Kukumbyr. He illustrated numerous books for the Detskaya Literatura publishing house, as well as for others.
He was the co-author, compiler, and designer of the landmark reference edition Artists of the Soviet Children’s Book.
Together with writer Grigory Oster, Dmitryuk ran a regular column titled “Children’s Corner” in the magazine Ogonyok. He also worked as a production designer on several animated films and contributed to nearly a dozen films made by the Diafilm studio. In addition, he created designs for productions of the Bolshoi Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT), and the New Opera.
His works were exhibited both in Russia and abroad.
For his illustrations to The History of a Town by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Russian Academy of Arts.
“My favorite trend in painting is naïve art. It still fills me with delight. Not all of it, of course, but sometimes there’s that special brilliance that a strictly professional artist can never achieve.”
“I believe that a children’s book should expand the boundaries of the world and awaken in a child the spirit of imagination — often timid and suppressed — and provoke them into creativity and participation.”
“In my heart, I’ve remained a caricaturist. I love the genre of the sketchbook drawing. You could call it a sketch or a draft, but I don’t like those terms. It’s a quick drawing. Speed conveys emotion — something that gets lost once you start translating it into a large-scale work. It’s very important, even in book illustration, to preserve the freshness of the sketch in the final image.”
Books
The Barrel-Pup
Original title: Бочонок собачонок Boris Zakhoder’s The Barrel-Pup is a joyful collection of poems filled with humor, imagination, and that unmistakable spark of childlike wonder. Here live an elephant, a bear, a goat and, of course, countless dogs and puppies. They are not just animals, but characters with their own […]
