From the mid-1840s onwards, the poet and painter Edward Lear made illustrated nonsense alphabets (also called "picture alphabets") as gifts for children of his acquaintance. Unfortunately, it is not known the name of the child or children for whom this alphabet was created. This volume is based on a poem by Edward Lear, published in 1877, that was illustrated and organized afterwards by Lica Sainciuc over a long period of 1978-1988-2008 into a book, in which the last also used old drawings by Edward Lear.
Author Biography:
Edward Lear (1812 -1888) was an English artist, musician and poet. As an artist, he was employed to illustrate birds and animals; making colored drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry in poem.But it was for his writing that Edward Lear is best known. He helped to make limericks popular with the general public when he produced his illustrated collection A Book of Nonsense in 1846. Most children will know the poem The Owl and the Pussycat as it has remained a staple of bedtime reading for more than a century and a half.Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. One of his most famous verbal inventions, the phrase "runcible spoon," occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries. Lica Sainciuc is an artist, illustrator of children books, designer, researcher, who made a significant contribution to the development of the Moldovan Fine arts of both the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Children's book illustration is his long standing passion, proving him to be an expert on the early school age, when children learn to read books and to appreciate everyday life. Artworks by Lica Sainciuc could be categorized into three stages. Throughout the mid 1970s to mid 1980s the artist's creative principles and professional preferences had forged. Since the very first experiments and all along his career, Lica Sainciuc has been targeting comic vision, introducing eloquent details to approach authenticity. He grotesquely distorted the rounded forms, laying stress on characteristic gestures, without overloading composition with trivial facial expressions. He had overcome the limitations of the official dogmatic guideline "national in form, socialist in content" featuring Soviet art. He largely contributed in disclaiming of the concept of "minor nature" of the children's book illustration in the context of Fine arts. Initially, the artist illustrated the oeuvre of the contemporary writers of the Soviet Moldova, Baltic countries and Russia. Particularly noteworthy as they were reprinted many times over the past forty years are the famous ABCs with songs, rhymes, poems - Albinuta by Grigore Vieru and Abecedar by Spiridon Vangheli, the most prominent and internationally known writers of the Republic of Moldova. The second stage of Lica Sainciuc's art evolved during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the visual art in the republic evolved along the publishing industry. In those times, Lica Sainciuc has illustrated not only works of contemporary Moldovan writers, but also European fairy tales and popular stories. The third stage of Lica Sainciuc's creative career can be defined as a lasting from the early 2000s until present days, the period of exploring the expressive possibilities of computer graphic applications. The artist continues to work, striving for innovation and the art of L. Sainciuc may be seen as a model, with which to posit arguments in favor of future development of the picture book illustration in Moldova.
