l'atelier

It came to me last night that the crescent moon is featured in a couple of my favorite illustrations by Ivan Bilibin (1876 to 1942). Bilibin is best known for his illustrations of Russian folk tales: The Tale of Tsaravich Ivan, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf; Vassilisa the Beautiful; Vassily the Unlucky; The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Many of the illustrations are bordered with simple graphic motifs that recall the Russian folk genre to which they belong.

Bilibin was also a noted stage designer whose portfolio included stage designs for the 1909 premiere production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or.

However noteworthy are his larger works, I’m attracted to some of his smaller illustrations featuring stark Russian landscapes that serve as endpieces or the back cover of books. Their simplicity is reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints.

Apart from his work as a illustrator, Bilibin painted scenes from his travels to Egypt and the Middle East. The paintings have a graphic quality often playing light against shadow in stark contrast to his illustrations of the northern Russian crescent moon.

View a Bilibin sampler.

Okay, stop groaning. This is Photoshopped. But I didn’t have my camera last evening when I went out to the bench in the north field to watch the sunset. The sunset action was at the northwest horizon, but this was happening to the southwest over Mount Hood. I burned every detail in my memory long enough to get back to civilization. This is as faithful a rendition as I can recall.

The alignment of the crescent moon, a small horizontal lenticular cloud and the peak of the mountain was probably auspicious, but just how so was not readily apparent to me. The magic was in the orange glow cast by the setting sun that slightly illuminated the underside of the cloud and the snow on the west flank of Mount Hood.

Maybe it was only that it seemed similar to this remarkable photograph of the sun and moon in alignment over the north pole: