To draw is to dream & to dream is to create magic

I’m certain any artistic medium allows artists to pursue their specific goals. Mine, which is drawing, particularly reflects on the drawing language above the rest and I find in there the tools I need in order to resume what I have in mind.

And, going back to that quote, it is true that there is magic in taking a blank white page and fill it with life, with a message, a story, emotions; but also, power and responsibility.

For me, comic is a very broad language that allows you to tell anything. As long as you have something to say, there are millions of possibilities you can explore by doing comics. My ideas, or the genesis for my stories, are a result of what I do in life.

I try to always let myself be open to inspiration, even during times where it seems very hard to get a hold of it. So literally anything can be acknowledged as an inspiration from a story. From buildings facades, to people in the shop, to a bird flying, the colour of the sky, the shape of a box, the lyrics of a song or the conversation you might have with someone else.

Everything is a source of inspiration and can turn out to be a great story.

My love for drawing & comic

I remember reading comics in my childhood like Mortadelo y Filemón, 13, Rue del Percebe, Asterix y Obélix, Lucky Luke or Tintín amongst others so it is something that has always been there along the way for me. But, funny thing, I’d always find myself stopping in certain pages to recreate another story in my head. Somehow they provided me certain scenes to explore universes I created on the go spending hours upon hours looking at the same goddamn page. That’s why I think I ended up doing it. It allows to create everything, another reality, up until the very last detail, and fill it in with stories.

Comic allows me to be specific and focus into the motion itself of a narrative. More classical art forms (though pictographic narrative is pretty old I would point out) like painting or sculpture, are also filled with narrative opportunities but, personally, nothing fulfils my intentionality more than the sequential structure of comic.

When I tell a story, I like to make sure to point out certain ideas, images or aspects of the whole puzzle and that’s precisely what I think the language provides me.

Plus, I find a particularly hauntingly beautiful experience to divide the space of a page into smaller pieces to create something that goes beyond that particular combination of images. To create a comic is similar to combine the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but without a picture guideline. Somehow, by gathering the pieces and putting them together, the message starts to take shape, form and sense.

Creating a book vs. creating unique pieces for an exhibtion

Well, I don’t really think comics are, or should be, outlandish from the exhibit scene or gallery rooms. It is true that comics have never received a great acceptance in the higher spheres of Art as they have been assimilated as a popular recreation more than a valuable artistic medium. However, nowadays, they are timidly being gradually accepted and so their introduction to galleries is, perhaps, no longer so striking. And what I mean is that, something so shapeshifting as a comic, that can take many forms, not only as a book, and still be presented in an exhibition as a legit piece of Art, is basically a double win in my eyes.

It is true though that comics have an easier way to get to the public, as they have enjoyed, since their inception, a great connection with printed media. Comic spreading is, indeed, much broader than an exhibition can be thanks to the system of mass production which, if we talk artistic value, don’t really take away anything from it, at least in my opinion. Why do we think Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece and Spiegelman’s Maus is up for debate when they both share the same form at the end – a book? Well, it seems there must be a bias on what we identify as “unique” and it all comes down to the roots of what society compares to the terminology of comic itself.

It is obvious though that, in the Art market, uniqueness, in terms of limited, is something that comes up quite often. But comics drawers don’t usually sell their original work which could be more subjected to this particular idea of uniqueness.

Somehow, the spreading of the message we tell through mass production is worth loosing that “unique” aspect in terms of exclusiveness.

Sometimes Art, at least the one you’d encounter in an exhibition, can be also unreachable for the general public or even too pretentious and snobby. I think this is not something that you would find so much in a comic, which doesn’t determine it to be less artistic, more simplistic or easier to disseminate.

Sometimes I wonder what comics really are. Why do they have to be subjected to the idea of a book? Comic is a language, not a specific shape.

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