Father
Frost
circa 1932
'Dost thou know me? -
me, the red-nosed Frost?' The young girl, frozen from her ears to the tips of
her toes, does not know this stranger of the forest and yet, despite her
predicament, she remains sweet and polite and always kind to him. He thus tests
her stamina, doubting her character and way of talk: he sends frigid winds
through her hair and fierce, snowy gusts against her skin. He brandishes the coldest
temperatures of his deepest winters, whipping the trees and bushes all around
into a frozen stupor, but still the girl replies, 'I am very comfortable, dear
Father Frost'.
Another of Aleksandr Afanasev's tales, Father Frost is seen illustrated beautifully
by the famous Bilibin. From the tracery on the girl's red trunk to the heavy
woolen weave of her mustard overcoat, and from Father Frost's green chequered
gloves to his billowing beard, the artist skilfully restricts colour to the
scene's only living creatures, leaving the rest to be doused under the blanket
of this one of many Russian winters. By tracing with dark ink the shadows of
branches and patches of bark, Bilibin allows the negative white spaces to act
as the individual pockets of snow. He gives texture to each heap without
conforming to a form of hyper realism - without even touching his brush to certain parts of the canvas - all so as to draw out a perspective particular to him, and
for us. A light dusk falls gently in the background, seen over the tops of those
blue-crowned trees, like the ending to a simply perfect tale.
