Exlibris of Nadiya Ponomarenko 1982

This is Oleksandr Aksinin’s bookplate for Nadiya Ponomarenko, made with etching sometime in the last century. I love the all-over-ness of the hatching, like a woven tapestry made of ink. It's so meticulously rendered it reminds you of a kind of sacred, or maybe insane, dedication to the act of image-making. The bookplate is small, but packs a punch. Look at that solid black rectangle in the middle – it anchors the composition like a void, throwing the rest of the image into hyper-relief. Then there are all those tiny boats carrying bottles, repeated like a mantra, or some kind of alchemical experiment, and the faces at the top, peering down like silent observers. All of this evokes a dreamlike quality, a personal cosmos. Aksinin’s bookplate reminds me a little bit of the work of William Blake, in the way it combines image and text to create a visionary world. I like to think about art as an ongoing conversation, a continuous process of reinterpreting and remixing ideas. Art is never really finished, is it?