A Specialist

Boris Spec, who lives in Riga, Latvia, writes about cars for Latvian and Russian magazines. Spec is a nickname for “specialist.” Boris says that his work was serious at first, the typical fare of boys: elaborate drawings of cars, helicopters and boats, all as illusive ballpoint illustrations. One day he drew a goat – seafarer, and uploaded it to the internet. The work was received with tremendous acclaim, and his career as an absurd caricaturist painter took off. As an illustrator, Spec is wonderful, but even though he tends towards raw and expressive gestures, he identifies with Mark Ryden and Hieronymus Bosch’s detail. Apart from his colleagues and friends, he enjoys a broad audience via the Russian Livejournal internet network, and his works have been printed in the Russian Esquire and his pictures were part of Charming Nonchalance project in the internet NoGallery. They say that Latvians hate their politicians and they have no interest in politics: so Spec doesn’t so much react to the current situation in Latvia and post-Soviet Russia, but more to the existence of politics and politicians themselves. He also reflects the success of cosmonautics and the fate of pop stars and he handles Hitler, Stalin and Lenin in the same way as jokes about three statesmen landing on a desert island... And Ryden deals with Abraham Lincoln in his way. Spec likes Daniil Charms and Sergei Dovlatov and Albert Camus, and his hard-to-translate texts have, as with his pictures, qualities building on onomatopoeia, rhythm and contrasting language styles with dry humor. For a long time I had been trying to think where I had seen the stars from his space pictures. Finally I realized they come from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s illustrations for his Little Prince.

01.01.2007