The name of my book, Snow on the Grass, has nothing to do with phenology. This, of course, if art is not equated to nature, or vice versa. Snow on Grass is a metaphor. The trees and the grass are still green, but you are awaiting snow from the heavens. This most often happens in October, though sometimes earlier: snow covers the yard, the trees, falls in a thin layer onto the grass. Then you put on your skis and cross the snowy meadow, from the stoop to the gate, leaving behind you two dark lanes. Snow sticks to your skis and you drag yourself home on what feels like two logs. When you look around the yard, you notice how the trees are still green through the thin layer of snow. Then, the hot sun comes out, and the snow melts away, flowing down the leaves as water and leaving behind the delicious smell of foliage. Snow on grass – it seems like a union of opposites. But between these opposites there is an electric discharge. You want to dig yourself into the green grass covered in snow and breathe in its freshness… and to have the freezing droplets run into your collar. Art is the instantaneousness of perception; in that moment the orderly procession if time and its inherent orderliness ceases. It is as though you’re living time out of order, removing and connecting pieces at your whim. This is why the book is called Snow on Grass.

This sort of literature does not contain trappings of our time. It does not pacify, it does not promise, it does not give hope, it contains no rules that would guarantee a person’s artistic future. It is not comfortable and it is not like traditional literature on fine art.

The book Snow on Grass is composed of lectures about the art of animation, read at various times in the city of Moscow, at the lectures for upper-division screenwriters and directors, and in Tokyo, Japan at animation classes. The book contains a large amount of art used in the process of work, sketches that are connected to the movie and a detailed conversation about the classics of world art (Goya, Dali, Velasquez, the Little Dutch Masters, Michelangelo, Fedotov, Solomatkin and many others). This book is just an attempt to remove the collar from animation so that it ceases to be a lapdog of live-action movies or other no less important fields of art. This book is the desire to demonstrate and prove that animation is connected with the general culture and has a historical context with the phenomenon of art.

Yuri Norshteyn