Artist Portfolio: Viktor Kalvachev
From a top art academy to comics, via the army and the clipart business: the Bulgarian artist shares stories with Gary Evans
The art of storytelling comes naturally to this Bulgarian comic illustrator.
Viktor Kalvachev is a great storyteller. During our time with the Bulgarianborn artist he tells us about the time when he earned a living drawing caricatures of drunk people in Sofia bars, making more money in some nights than his dad made in a month. Then there’s the one that involved negotiating a lucrative contract with a US company to produce vector images – despite having no experience producing vector images – and eventually building a team that created over 5,000 unique clip art pictures every single month.
One of Viktor’s stories reveals how he moved to California to start the job for which he successfully interviewed with a black eye and hair dyed accidentally green. Another about how he moved to Paris to work on a video game based on his own comic book.
There’s the story about how he somehow acquired state-of-the art 3D software that enabled his small team in Sofia to make better assets for children’s games than most companies were making for adult games. The one about how he went on a kind of reconnaissance mission to the US to get a feel for America culture (for the clip art assignment) and had an embarrassing moment with a drinks machine in a burger joint. And another about how he was forced to skip his honeymoon to meet a deadline (for the clip art job again).
Yet the stories that we’ve chosen to focus on here are even better. Early in our interview, Viktor says this good thing about his childhood: “I always knew one day I would be an artist.” He says this same way he’d state his name or his nationality, with the same casual certainty. “I always knew.”
Viktor grew up in the 70s and 80s in communist Bulgaria, so he didn’t have access to the usual comics, films, television, or “anything remotely similar to western kids.” Fine art was the thing. He knew his Caravaggio, his Leonardo da Vinci. His family owned the Great Soviet Encyclopedia – all 30 volumes – as well as the children’s version, which had illustrations he could copy or trace. He always drew people, never environments. People were more interesting.
COMIC INSPIRATION
His dad “magically produced” a subscription to a comic called Pif Gadget, made by French communists. Viktor didn’t know he was reading allegory and propaganda. He was into the stories. Wednesdays, when the magazine arrived with its free selfassembly toy, were some of the “brightest moments of my childhood.” Herluf Bidstrup was another. The Danish cartoonist made these thrilling one-page vignettes, pen and ink, no text, expressive characters, simple lines. Bidstrup said a lot with little.
But when did Viktor have such confidence he would become an
I always knew one day I would be an artist… I always knew
artist? “It was a sunny day outside,” Viktor says, starting another perfectly structured story. “My family lived on the first floor in a building that looked like the projects in western culture. All the kids were outside playing football. They were like: “Come down. Come play with us. We just need one more to make the sides.” I said: “No. I want to draw.” That’s how I knew I was going to become an artist. I had my priorities straight.”
THE REBEL
Viktor attended a high school in hometown of Varna, which specialised in art. To get in, he had to sit an exam that involved drawing a square, a sphere and some drapery. His dad sent him to a local art teacher to practise. She made him fill more than a hundred 50x70cm pieces of paper with nothing but crosshatching. Viktor sucked at first, but gradually he
My family lived on the first floor in a building that looked like the projects in western culture
got better. The teacher finally allowed him to draw a square, a sphere and some drapery. Technique was now second nature, leaving him free to focus on the feel of the drawings: values, shadow, texture.
The second part of the exam focused on colour, and Viktor couldn’t do colour. But his dad managed to get him some watercolour pencils – which nobody really had in Bulgaria in those days. The “magic trick” of water transforming apparently normal coloured pencils into watercolour paint helped him “knock it out of the park.”
His next entry examination wouldn’t go so well. Viktor applied to the prestigious National Academy of Arts. Everybody who applied had talent. To get in, you needed connections. Luckily, Viktor’s dad (from whom Viktor clearly gets his industriousness and resourcefulness) got hold of one of the Academy’s illustration professors. “The dude just ripped me to pieces,” Viktor says.
That was the night before the exam. During the exam itself, his nose bled all over his work. Viktor decided to join the army.
ARMY DREAMER
In the late 80s and early 90s, communism was starting to fall in Bulgaria and throughout Europe. So Viktor’s time in the army wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. He was supposed to know how to blow things up (“I don’t. I would be a terrible solider”). What he ended up doing was painting original pieces of art for his commanding officers based on the tacky postcards they picked up on their travels: boats bobbing in the harbour, cheesy sunsets. Viktor quickly got bored. He
hatched a plan to parody the famous Ilya Repin painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire. Viktor’s version – two metres wide – would portray his own commanding officers in a very unflattering light. Pretty soon, word got out, and Viktor was demoted to the duties of a regular solider. But not for long.
The old army band had just retired. The new army band needed a singer. Viktor, by his own admission, wasn’t the best vocalist. But nobody else dared sing, so he filled the vacancy and for the next six months sang every night in the army bar, covering of Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi. “So,” Viktor says, “I had quite a lot of fun.”
Viktor started to enjoy his drawing again. He applied to the Academy – mainly because the army would give him time off to sit the exams. Viktor went with his girlfriend to Sofia and had a “good time.” Because either option – the Army or the Academy – placed no pressure on him, when it came to the exams he “killed it.”
Viktor’s time in the Academy was equally dramatic (“me being 20 years old, all rebel and shit”). He chose to resit the whole of his first year after a bust-up with a professor. He was also allowed to skip classes that focused on his big weakness: colour. Looking back, he believes his professors should have pushed him to improve what was now “a huge block.”