The Wild Edge

Vadim Gorbatov, one of Russia’s best nature illustrators, has been drawing since he was four years old. “It was wartime,” he said, “and, like all children of that time, I drew pictures of war. At the same time, I started to draw animals. One time in kindergarten, prior to the New Year’s holiday, while children were sleeping, a room for games was decorated with stuffed birds and mammals, dry tree branches, leaves, and cotton. When I entered the room, I was stunned. This picture impressed me so profoundly that I remember it today, sixty years later.”

Born in 1940 in Moscow and evacuated to the Altai with his family during WWII, Gorbatov has traveled for six decades throughout the former Soviet Union, observing and drawing nature and its inhabitants.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gorbatov has begun to get more exposure in the West. Part of this is due to his participation in the Artists for Nature Foundation, an organization based in the Netherlands that brings together well-known artists in every medium from what its founder, Ysbrand Brouwers, calls “endangered locations,” so that their artwork can focus attention on the need for conservation. Gorbatov has been working with Artists for Nature since its founding in 1999, and has expanded his palette to include wildlife from Alaska, the Pyrenees, India, and more. But his favorites – birds of prey, large predators, and the fauna of northern Russia, the taiga and the tundra – remain his most evocative.

A characteristic of Gorbatov’s art is his depiction of the edge where humans and wildlife meet. Many artists paint nature as though people had never existed. Gorbatov paints history, dogs, farms, 19th century Russian princes and peasants, hunts with spear and borzoi and falcon, fights with bears. In his work, a modern hunter, a WWII veteran, watches his spaniels retrieve perches on a sunken German tank... a weasel hunts beside a rusting machine gun... an abandoned village chapel’s roof lets in the snow, while icons and a cross keep vigil in a corner, as crossbills fly above... a capercaillie perches above a laika hound (page 27), whose barking summons an unseen hunter.

“I spent my childhood in a village,” Gorbatov recalls, “where I could interact with animals, and the beautiful, still rich and unpolluted natural environment of central Russia. Postwar times were difficult. Therefore, our family as well as our neighbors, had chickens, ducks, goats, and pigs. We had dogs and cats. There was a herd of cows, and a stable of horses in the village. All these were themes for my drawings.

“When other kids were playing soccer or flirting with girls, I wandered in the woods, fields and swamps. I had half a binocular, and I knew all the nests of the birds and dens of the mammals in our forest.” His parents, he said, encouraged his interest by “not minding the presence of feathered and furred creatures and other pets in the house. I kept lizards, frogs, salamanders, injured birds, squirrels, and ferrets. I had birds of prey, such as kestrels, buzzards, and sparrowhawks.”

At the Academy of Industrial Design, Gorbatov was trained as a graphic artist and went on to work in Soviet television. But his love of nature stuck with him. “The impressions of my childhood and the interest in animals that emerged during that time were probably very strong. After I had been involved with new, fresh ideas of ‘industrial aesthetics’ and industrial design, graduated from the Academy, and defended my dissertation, I returned to what was dear to me during my childhood, and resumed drawing animals.”

Birds of prey are one of the major themes in Gorbatov’s work. Each year, he illustrates a calendar for the Russian firm, Infobank. The 2002 calendar focused on falconry, and Gorbatov filled it with images of raptors – Arabs hunting houbara bustards with falcons, a modern Kazakh with tazi dog and eagle, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II with a gyrfalcon, Russian falconry, with falcon and goshawk and sparrowhawk (see cover).

The fierce goshawk, used as the “kitchen hawk” by nomads and peasants because it will catch more edible game than the more specialized and impractical “noble” falcon, is almost a totemic bird in Gorbatov’s art. The masters of the hawk in art were probably the anonymous painters of the Tokugawa shogunate in 17th century Japan, who worked with ink on silk, but Gorbatov has matched or even exceeded them. See, for instance, his Turkestani nomad with horse and hawk, his furious hawk just missing a magpie in an orchard near his apartment in Moscow (page 26), or his quick and lively (ballpoint) pen sketch “Goshawk,” with its glaring yellow eyes. For economy and fiery life, there is nothing to match them.

Gorbatov stays involved with falconry. “Hunting with birds of prey has a special place in my mind,” he said. “I am fascinated with this kind of hunting; it is simply a part of nature’s process... profit and trophy hunting have no place in it. In falconry, everything is in the process, not in the result.”

While Gorbatov puts together the Infobank calendar every year, and contributes both covers and text illustrations to the Russian magazine, Hunting and Nature, which may be the oldest continually-published outdoor magazine in the world (started in 1878 by naturalist and hunting editor Leonid Sabaneev), he is not a hunter himself. “I was not a hunter when I was a child, but I made bows and slingshots like other boys,” he said. “Later, during my youth, I hunted hazel hens with a gun. I have a positive attitude to hunters, and do not consider them enemies of nature. The true hunters among my friends, with whom I travel to hunt (I do not take a gun, only binoculars and a notebook), are nature lovers who care about the preservation of wilderness. These hunters are excellent pathfinders, knowledgeable in biology and animal behavior. To them, hunting is primarily an interaction with nature and a reason to get away from the big cities. Among Russian artists whose work I value, among writers and actors, there are many true and passionate hunters.

“Of course, there are other categories of hunters. There are market hunters; to them, an animal is just a piece of meat. They can be understood, because their life is hard and they must survive and feed their family. But to me, there is also an unpleasant category of hunters: rich people, who travel all over the world, obsessed with the desire to add another prestigious trophy to their collection. To them, hunting is a thrilling game, which they play under conditions of comfort. They are not interested in nature, are poorly informed in the biology and way of life of the animals which they hunt, but are very familiar with their qualities as trophies!”

Gorbatov’s paintings show an intimacy and familiarity with place that comes from decades of traveling the length and breadth of Russia. “To the artist-animalist,” he says, “it is absolutely necessary to work in wild nature and visit the wild places where the animals which you draw live.” From the Far East, he shows us the tiger prowling the beach north of Vladivostok, and “Mother and Child” (page 25), where a mother and her cub look down a long eastern valley as nutcrackers swirl overhead. The tiger theme haunts his historical portrait of a native plant hunter (page 24) in those same mountains, who looks up in surprise to see the great predator looming over him in the jungle-dense foliage. The steppes of Central Asia flavor the oil painting “Berkutchi” (the Kazakh word for the trainer of eagles) – a rich historical portrait of a Kazakh hunter with his eagle, horse, a saiga antelope (no longer quarry since its numbers have been reduced) and two tazi dogs. In more recent works, he brings to life the boggy, forested subarctic wilderness of Karelia. Some of its fauna, like the displaying capercaillie (page 23) are quite different from those we see in the US; others – ducks, woodcock, corvids, grouse, moose, and weasels – are almost the same. Here, again, he shows the touch of the human hand, in the flags used – unsuccessfully! – to confine the wolf to the end of a beat in “Jumping the Flag” (above), and in the fallen beam sheltering a sunning adder.

Recently, a Korean publisher commissioned Gorbatov to illustrate a new edition of Ernest Thomson Seton’s Lobo, the story of the fall of an “outlaw” wolf in late 19th century New Mexico. The assignment was fitting: no one can draw wolves like Gorbatov. But the artist had never been to New Mexico. Working with photos of local landforms and plants, and through additional research, he produced historically perfect cowboy outfits and weapons. The atmosphere, vistas, and weather in the works make it seem as if Gorbatov has spent a lifetime on the New Mexico plains. The wolves are alive, both magnificent and, in the end, heartbreaking in their doom. But how did he know the clouds in this region run before the wind, or that there are always ravens in the sky? It is just part of the lively imagination, the craft, art, and magic, of Vadim Gorbatov.  RL