In the technique of linocut, the main series of prints and dozens of individual sheets by Lydia Alexandrovna Ilina have been created, which, along with her works in books, have placed her among the leading masters of Kyrgyz and Soviet graphics, gaining recognition both in our country and abroad. The bold, decisive language of linocut turned out to be the most adequate to the character of the figurative thinking of this master, who freely masters all printmaking techniques, and whose name is "associated with the greatest achievements of Soviet graphics of monumental forms, ideologically active, filled with a high civic sense."
The early 1960s marked a significant period in Ilina's work with the creation of a true masterpiece of Kyrgyz and Soviet graphics — the linocut "Delegate from Tien Shan" (1960), which, due to the intensity of the image's ideological charge and the precisely found solution of artistic form, became not only a symbol of the renewed Kyrgyzstan and the liberated woman of the Soviet East, but also an artistic embodiment of the socialist formation, the triumph of people's power, and the Soviet way of life. Here, a bright, impressive image is created. The image is enriched by the combination of the harsh plasticity of the silhouette with details that emphasize the femininity of the heroine — the softly defined features of her beautiful face, the smooth outline of her uncovered head with a sleek hairstyle, the elegantly draped scarf over her shoulders, and the touching earrings in her ears.
Following this engraving, which was shown in many countries around the world, came the series of lithographs "Black Years" (1962), where a detailed narrative depicts the full drama and sadness of the image of the people's life in the feudal-colonial past, as well as the cycle "Across Kyrgyzstan" (1963), which celebrates the present day of the republic. This was followed by the well-known series of linocuts "Women of the World" (1965), "Youth of Kyrgyzstan" (1966), and "Motherhood" (1967), for which L. A. Ilina was awarded the State Prize of the USSR. In these works, she appears as a master of large artistic generalizations, an artist capable of expressing the essential aspects of phenomena in combination with that uniquely individual feeling of concrete life, without which there is no art.
Here, her mature mastery is also manifested — mastery of drawing, composition, and the expressive possibilities of graphic material, flexibly and accurately used to express the figurative concept.
In the series "Women of the World," which is call-to-action and journalistic in content, the graphic form possesses almost poster-like expressiveness. The international pathos is particularly striking in the engraving "Dare Not!" featuring the figure of an Eastern woman on a podium, and the sharply composed, light-toned sheet "If Only Mothers of the Whole Earth..."
