Artist Arkady Sher: biography, creativity, personal life, cause of death

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The biography of Arkady Sher is the clearest example of selfless service to his calling: to give young and adult children real joy and a fairy tale. By all means become a children's artist, despite all the difficulties and lack of money. To be a truly kind and bright person.

Childhood

Arkady Solomonovich Sher was born on May 29, 1934 in Moscow. It seems that fate prepared our hero for his life purpose from birth, since he lived his first years on Kalyaevskaya (now Dolgorukovskaya) Street in the immediate vicinity of Soyuzmultfilm, in which Arkady Sher would later devote more than thirty years. In the meantime, he ran around the studio building like a clockwork, inventing simple children's games with his peers, and from time to time inhaled an unfamiliar, but for some reason such an alluring smell from a pipe sticking out of one of the Soyuzmultfilm windows.

It was the best smell in the world - the smellanimation, magic and unknown worlds. Only later, many years later, did Arkady find out that this was actually the smell of gases from the pouring shop, quite poisonous, and therefore dangerous.

From early childhood, the boy showed a talent for drawing. He enthusiastically copied book illustrations and invented his own characters. Pencils and an album were constant companions of the young artist. Arkady Solomonovich himself subsequently described that time as follows:

I drew better than anyone in my family. Considering that in our family no one painted at all…

By the way, a neighbor of the Cher family worked at Soyuzmultfilm and more than once offered Arkady's mother to try her son's strength as an artist of this studio. However, the future creator of the cartoon characters "Vacations in Prostokvashino" and "Winter in Prostokvashino" himself doubted his talent so much that he flatly abandoned this idea.

Youth

After graduating from the seventh grade, Arkady Sher unexpectedly dropped out of secondary school and entered the railway technical school at the locomotive department. However, he did not have time to finish his studies, as he was drafted into the army, into the navy.

Tests of the young sailor lasted four years. And when he finally returned to Moscow, it turned out that his branch of the locomotive economy had already been closed. In order to somehow help his son, his father gave Arkady a job at a design institute. After some time, the young man neverthelessmanaged to enroll immediately in the third year, this time at the construction college.

Then a misfortune happened: Arkady ended up in a hospital ward with an incomprehensible illness. Doctors misdiagnosed him and operated on for more than two hours. As a result, Cher spent three months in the hospital and left it as a disabled person of the second group.

The path to animation

Arkady Sher got into the cherished building with a wondrous smell from childhood, the Soyuzmultfilm studio, by accident. One fine day in 1959, his older brother literally flew into his room and shouted:

Let's go soon! "Soyuzmultfilm" announces a competition of cartoonists. Get your drawings!..

Arkady resisted a little, but still took his albums and followed his brother, leaning on a crutch. The selection committee liked his drawings, but they were not professional: the lack of experience and proper education affected. Therefore, Arkady's multiplier competition did not pass.

Then Cher began to ask for any job: even an electrician or a cleaner, if only here, within the walls of Soyuzmultfilm. They went to meet him and took him to the drawing shop.

It was a real victory. At the word "workshop" Arkady imagined a long spacious room, tables, bright lighting, cleanliness and order. But when he entered the drawing shop, he, by his own admission, got into a real bed bug, more like a warehouse of old furniture.

So began the creative career of Arkady Sher, animatorwithout education. The drawing workshop was the lowest paid and least creative in Soyuzmultfilm. However, it was necessary to work here for glory, so there was a large turnover in it. Nevertheless, Arkady spent 8 years in this place, during which time he became a true professional in his field.

Career and creativity

Starting with a drawer at the Soyuzmultfilm studio, Cher went through all the other stages of the cartoonist profession. From 1967 to 1979 he worked as an assistant production designer. After that, he became a studio production designer - he worked in this position until 1992 - and later a director.

Having gone such a long and thorny path to his real vocation, Arkady Solomonovich Sher participated in the creation of such masterpieces of domestic animation as "Vacation in Prostokvashino", "Winter in Prostokvashino", "Akademik Ivanov", "We are with Sherlock Holmes”, “The Adventures of Vasya Kurolesov”, “A Case in the Swamp” from the cartoon magazine “Merry Carousel”.

Also, Arkady Sher became a production designer for such cartoons as "Kvazhdy kva", "How the donkey fell ill with sadness", "The cat who could sing" and many others.

Sher's favorite hero was the postman Pechkin. Many friends and acquaintances of Arkady believed that he drew him from himself, and the character of Uncle Fyodor's Mom - from his wife.

Below in the photo - Arkady Solomonovich Sher in the image of the postman Pechkin.

From the beginning of the 90s, Arkady decided to try himself as a writer. He became the author of such books for children as "The Thirtieth Tales, or Such Pies", "Caught a Top on the Hook" and "Five Minutes to Happiness", and in 2014 a book of his memoirs "View from the Window" was published.

Private life

Toward the end of the 90s, Arkady Solomonovich was often asked if he was related to the world-famous singer Cher? In fact, Cher is just a celebrity pseudonym. Our hero has a real surname. Arkady Sher is a Jew by his father, and therefore his unusual surname is quite understandable.

He preferred not to discuss his personal life with anyone, considering it a closed topic. It is known that Arkady Solomonovich had the only beloved woman and wife - Nina Mikhailovna. They lived together a whole life. From the very beginning they were independent, together they endured adversity and lack of money. Arkady was very depressed that he married a young beautiful girl, very similar to Uncle Fyodor's Mom from the cartoon about Prostokvashino. He was unable to properly dress her, or even feed her. Needless to say, for a long time they lived just from hand to mouth.

Nevertheless, Arkady Sher's family treated everything stoically and with understanding. Because there were real feelings that lasted a lifetime…

Death

Starting from 2010, Arkady Solomonovich began to get very sick. He suffered from inflammation of the joints, as a result of which he forever lostthe ability to draw, which became an even more terrible and painful test for the artist.

August 7, 2018 Arkady Solomonovich passed away. He was 84 years old…

Until the last day, he did not change his optimistic and never discouraged character, he remained a very kind and sweet person. No one will ever know what most of all caused the death of Arkady Sher - a serious long-term illness or the inability to draw.

The most surprising thing was the fact that Arkady Solomonovich until the end of his days continued to doubt his own unique talent and believed that all the praises that he had heard in his address were quite far-fetched…