——With more than 200 illustrated books, how did you decide to join this career?
I always say they become illustrators by accident. I come from a world of painting that never came up with anything similar to what I’m doing now. In other words, at a certain moment, the writer Xabier P. DoCampo traveled through my life. Let’s get together at an exhibition in the 1980s, start talking, look at my research, get a taste of what I’m doing, and start collaborating. In addition, he also illustrated for the press and cultural magazines, and the first books he illustrated were “The Water Babies” and “Prince of Lum”, two articles by Xabier. I was so fascinated that I became more and more an illustrator rather than a painter because the day lasted the same 24 hours.
Illustrating children’s and young adult literature isn’t as clever as it seems. You have to dig into the text, do some analytical reading, and look for those parts that remain in the hidden depths of the text, and the illustrator has to dive into them to avoid repetition. It’s this complexity that makes it a fascinating undertaking.
——In addition, you also participated in the concept design of the movie “A casa da luz”. What differences have I experienced along the way?
Xabier never wrote a bad text because as he progressed he didn’t try to illustrate it, he found some way or some aspect that interested him and he didn’t worry about making changes to the text. Likewise, he incorporated moito into my illustrations. There is always a permanent dialogue when writing a book. There is also ocorreu o mesmo in A casa da luz. In my work I always try to refer to the art world, because from a pedagogical point of view it is even a residual value that is deceived in books. Further, in The Blind Painter, the last book we didn’t want to see, there were a lot of references that we had agreed on for a while. These things also don’t apply to all formats.
For example, an illustrated photo album has a lot of room to moderate the illustrations, as it allows dialogue between the images. If there is a small format like “A casa da luz”, the illustrations are more independent. They also intervened when the book was brought to cinemas, and although not all references were taken into account, we did take into account some of the most important ones. Obviously, film language has nothing to do with illustrated books, so you have to know how to adapt or format it.
—These references are also a way to stay creative, right?
An illustrator is necessarily a reader, because if you don’t have the habit of reading, it’s hard to find the synthesis that must exist to illustrate a book. This can help you understand how to read the text. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not just reading that enriches the creative world. I am constantly reading everything in the environment I live in: I read a lot in nature, in the city… Now I am also working on a project that lacks the relationship that exists between light, time and silence. So what should I do, go to a village every season to watch the sunrise, always staying at the same point.
Although this is an area with very little light pollution, as the sun begins to rise and the mountain shapes begin to appear in the background, there appears to be a process of image degradation. This experience and reading was crucial to the work I mentioned and is an example of reading in the context of this book. Some trips are the same: I like to book a weeklong vacation and get lost in a less trafficked area, where the common denominator is quiet. They are the experiences I have accumulated through my experience. They are rich in images and have been of great help to my illustration training.
read more