Violeta Lópiz

Violeta: When Bruaá invited me to illustrate Cláudio Thebas's poem, I liked the text because of its simplicity. I thought it was so simple that I could illustrate it quickly – something that I often try, but never manage to achieve.

My slowness is nothing but my brain's need to reset itself every time it faces a new project. It forgets everything that it has done up to that point and needs quite a while to repair itself and be able to produce something new.

This time, the first thing I did to reset my brain was move to Lisbon (thanks to the generosity of the Portuguese Screen Printing Centre that hosted me). The second thing I did was to read the poem over and over again, which made me understand that it's not a simple text at all, as it gives away almost no clues and doesn't have a storyline.

(I spent a large part of my Lisbon life stuck in a chair.)

The third thing I did was to find Miguel, one of Bruaá's two editors, who proved to be a gentleman from another time. He gave me the Cantigas do Maio album by José Afonso and a blind trust that left me stunned.

I devoted half of the time to deciphering what Cláudio's text was telling me and the other half trying to understand what I wanted to convey. Finding the idea, matching it with the text, the style, the content, the technique, the page sequence, the intention, the characters, the sizes, the composition, the relationship with the text, the setting of the text... all of that amounts to quite a laborious puzzle.

At some points, I felt like a clumsy Buster Keaton setting up an old tent. I would hoist up one of the little sticks and another one would fall down; when I had three sticks up, I couldn't reach the nails and they all fell down again; and when there was only the fourth stick to go, a bear came and I had to run off.

My process is quite a chaotic one. I allow myself to be guided by my intuition. If I get tired of researching, I start drawing or writing, and when I run out of ideas, I switch tasks again. This a trick that Linda Wolfsgruber taught me when she saw me getting blocked.

For this project, I decided to explore the relationship between places and people, architecture and feelings, mental maps, places on the body, in the mind, on the street... The memories that live in those places and the places that live within memories.

I submerged myself in the architecture and the cartography — collecting houses, roofs, chimneys, shops, walls, windows, squares, markets and routes.

I was ready to do two things that I didn't know how to do before: draw buildings and paint with felt-tip pens.

At the same time, I felt the need to tell a story with images – a story that would personally link me to the work. And there, I rediscovered something I had originally discovered as a little girl: realising that something exists when that something is no longer there...

Thanks to spending time alone, I noticed things that I didn't notice when someone was with me. One of these things was the pleasure and the need to have friends.

Even though it scared me a bit, I decided to distance myself from the text and illustrate what I felt about friendship. I would let the images be in contrast to the text but talk about the same thing.

I planned out the story so that the protagonist would always appear alone. Only the places would be left over from the friends who were no longer there. By replacing the children with places, a tension would be created, as well as a contrast which would be resolved by an emotive ending.

With this approach, I felt that the reader would be invited to search for the place where Cláudio says the protagonist's friends live.

I continued sketching and defining images...

The searching phase ended when I produced the following image.

After the learning and the exploration, what is left is the choice of a path – which in my case begins with a sign. This sign is the surprise of doing an illustration that I really like, and that I still like after several days. Once found, it serves me as a guide for the rest of the work to be done.

The final stage was planning the pages of the book: the composition and all the elements. I did the storyboard the size of a matchbox and I showed it to Bruaá. Slowly, the pages got filled.

I really enjoyed painting the people and hiding all of my friends inside the illustrations.

The music to this book is José Afonso; the theme is the crazy wind on the Rua dos Industriais and the alarm to change the firefighter's shift; the smell is the wet streets of Lisbon and the ink of master Marçal's studio; the taste is quince, requeijão and Portuguese stew; the book is ‘Maps of the imagination’ by Peter Turchi.

Illustrations © Violeta Lópiz. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.

Buy this picturebook

Amigos do peito /
Friends from the heart

Cláudio Thebas & Violeta Lópiz

Bruaá Editora, Portugal, 2014

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A boy wants to talk to us about friends from the heart. He takes us through the streets of his neighbourhood, which happens to be very much like our own. But these streets and houses are not the only things that seem familiar to us: the boy's voice also does. And the friends he talks about seem to remind us of our own friends – because we all have them – and we all play with them in one neighbourhood or another.

This poetic text by Cláudio Thebas is wonderfully interpreted and amplified by the beautiful illustrations of Violeta Lópiz.