Artist Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. This is a unique digital artwork created from the original drawing D-161.
“It is difficult to say anything very precise and specific about the drawings that I started to make around 1953 and that I continue to produce to this day.
The only thing that might be said is that they were never done consciously, according to some grand plan and with some goal in mind, but rather they would float up from the depths of my imagination in the form of a vivid image,
complete in all its details, so all that remained for me to do was to transfer it to paper.
The second thing that might be said about my drawings is that they always emerged not “singly”, but in some sort of whole series all at once:
sometimes the series would consist of 3-4 drawings, sometimes 15, and sometimes, they would emerge in such quantities that I didn’t know how to stop drawing and escape from their sheer number.
My technique for executing drawings was always the most banal, “null”, and I never worried about the formal, technical or aesthetic quality of what I was putting on the paper.
I was never interested in any kind of graphic techniques: neither lithographic, nor engraving on wood or linoleum, nor different types of plates, photography, etc.
I always used just simple pencil or colored pencils, pen, and in Moscow, black ink and fountain pen. Sometimes the drawing were then colored in with watercolors…
…In surveying the entire quantity of drawings done over all these years, one might also say that is impossible to discover some sort of stylistic integrity that would unite them, a style that developed in my earliest drawings and continues to this day. Any drawing can be dated to any year, no single group of drawings follows any specific preceding one; in the extreme it might be said that the entire collection of drawings was done by various artists. The reason is that I was never interested in developing my own personal style, my own artistic, recognizable language, that which is called “the artist’s signature style.” Not having this concern, I repeat, I would draw whatever came into my head, and what entered my head, as it turned out, were the most diverse things and not things that were integrated and logically sequential…”
(Ilya Kabakov, About My Drawings, Drawngs/Dessins, p.110, 111)
