Walls and memories

This summer, we decided to change the wallpapers. I took advantage of the one day when the walls stood bare, and fulfiled a childhood dream - drew on them! The hall was turned into a museum of personal memories. And just like real memories, the drawings are now unseen, hidden by wallpaper, but still there, still existing. Just like the place depicted in the engraving (aqua forte, aqua tinta) - a half-real place, the inside of the mind.

The fantastic encycopedia

Fantastic animals have fascinating stories, whether man has found them in the faraway blank spaces on maps or in the darkness of his head. Those images were part of a great, never finished project - a fantastic encyclopedia, entirely made up - a fake mithology, if you like. Someting similar to... this. The works - colography, in case you were wondering- were done in my third year of college and I still hope to come back to them sometime.

Social-Relation Kit

Sometimes you feel like you need a different mask for each occasion, like a real-life avatar. And here are the ever changing faces of the human being - feel free to combine them any way you choose. This work was done for an Experimental Engraving Biennial, lino cut on wood, made to resemble a cheap game you might buy in a Chinese shop, because it looks like fun.

The Unreal Manuscripts - part 3

This is a lithograph, done sometime in 2006. It represents a diary page, something you might scribble while on the phone, or daydreaming. And it is a manuscript... a page of my personal history.

The Unreal Manuscripts - Part 2

The Last Supper - adnoted. The format was inspired by a Korean poetry book.

The Unreal Manuscripts -part 1

This is a postmodern interpretation of the sacred texts of humanity. A fake manuscript. A collection of stories I can just barely remember. And maybe, a fragment of what Jung called the collective memory...

The sacred texts

There is a moment - in early childhood - when you receive all that is given with eyes and heart wide open. The border between reality and fantasy does not exist - and is inconceivable. That is when I discovered the Bible, and accepted it as a giant story-book. Not even the clash with religious bureaucracy, or my teenage rebellion against rules, or the philosophical cynicism of my youth have succeeded to erase this feeling. The way I remember, sacred texts are surprising, strange and mysterious. They are never content with a happy ending, they can be explained in so many ways. But most of all, after centuries spent in the imprisonment of absolutist interpretations, they have managed to preserve a deeper meaning - one that can be glimpsed, but never captured in words. Or images.

Graffiti autumn

This autumn, I spent time working as a volunteer on a project called Colour in my School's Yard. The school's yard looked like this:

So we made plans - and by we I mean Maria, Ileana and Madalina Surducan, Ludmila Ciorici, Iulia Rob, Dana Matei and Dafina Mosutan:

We worked hard:

And this is what turned out - click to enlarge:

The Curious Elephant - the book

As promised, here is the book - 13.5 x 10.3 cm.

The curious little Elephant

...or the story of how the elephant got his truck. Those were done in one day, mostly by Photoshop. And the visual imitates the texture of a lino cut. A homemade book will soon follow.

Another sort of journey

Maps for traveling the real world, we've seen them all. There are no more blanks on our atlases, and remote tribes of the Amazon show up on our Yahoo page. But still... the darkness behind our eyes remains an unknown country. What kind of maps shall we draw for it?

These were done with the aid charcoal, ink and a mirror... Since then, and out of shear vanity, I have changed my glasses.

Maps and journeys

There is something fascinating about maps. Maybe it's the promise of freedom, the hope of a voyage or just the taste of nostalgia we associate with traveling. Interesting enough, sometimes the journeys that exist in potential, the journeys a map promises without actually delivering, those are more satisfying than an actual trip. Because there are no limits, no borders and no security checks on our imagination...

These were done in ink, oil pastels and Letraset markers, then scanned and assembled in Photoshop. The zodiacal figures are from Albrecht Dürer's Celestial Map of the Northern Sky.

Portrait of the illustrator as a young artist...

The title really says it all... I was always fascinated by the power of the illustration to "helps make something clear or attractive " as Google search so nicely puts it. Seriously speaking, a word is in fact an abstract idea - translating it into image is a strange and illusory process, but with breathtaking results.
Watch the young artist seting up to uncover the mysteries of the process, with one objective in mind - getting lost in translation.