This festival is a gathering of everyone and everything, but it is also a turning point, an invitation to continue demanding, to stop the rise of extremism and reaction with colour, with dance, with community and with activism. This Olga de Dios festival is much more than just an exhibition. It's a meeting place, it's a manifesto... it's a small but tremendous revolution..
(González, 2021, p.52).
Introduction
The aim of this study is to analyse the work and career of the graphic artist Olga de Dios, seeking the keys that serve as a link between her successful work as a children's illustrator and her recent incursion into the world of art through painting.
To this end, a brief survey will be made of his most representative books, analysing their contents and the evolution of their aesthetic characteristics, followed by a study of the stylistic and conceptual features of his first major pictorial exhibition and, finally, the link between his work in both disciplines.
Olga de Dios and illustration. Vindication.
Olga de Dios (San Sebastián, 1979), trained as an architect and worked in this professional field and as a graphic designer until her artistic interests led her to study at the Escuela de Arte número diez (Madrid). In 2013, she presented her final project, an illustrated album entitled Pink MonsterThe book was published by the Apila publishing house. The book was published by the publishing house Apila and, that same year, it was awarded as the best album in the category "International Original Picture Book" at the Shanghai Children ́s Book Fair. In 2014 he was awarded by the LGTB+ collective of Madrid with the "Cultural Triangle of COGAM" and was selected for the NOC programme (Network Originality Competition), a programme of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China to bring children's literature to all Chinese schools through new technologies.
Since then Pink Monster has become a long sellerThe book has twenty-two editions to date in Spanish and has been translated into twelve languages.
In an album such as Pink Monster a wide variety of aspects come together.
On the one hand, the artistic side. Olga de Dios's very personal style is manifested in illustrations using digital techniques that combine the ingenuity and spontaneity of Näif art with the freshness of the plastic language used by children. The illustration is expressive, daring, dynamic, carefree and fun. On neutral backgrounds with the texture of watercolour paper with degraded patches of colour, the characters and objects are drawn with hesitant, hesitant, scribbled lines, lines that break out of the figure, that are reiterated and superimposed. An aesthetic based on an apparently fast, spontaneous and careless line drawing, which identifies with the way children draw because of its simplicity, behind which is hidden, however, a profound attention to detail and a sought-after imperfection (Garrido, 2019).
In his illustrations, childishness does not mean simplistic images of univocal meaning, but quite the opposite, and in them the weight of the pictorial, avant-garde art and contemporary graphic design is present (fig.1).
Fig.1 Pink Monster (2013), Olga de Dios. Source: Apila Ediciones.
After all, the children's album is primarily aimed at a very special audience: children, but also at parents and adults interested in the aesthetic and educational values of illustration.
On the other hand, in relation to the literary and narrative aspects, the simplicity of a well-told story with which we can all identify, a story designed to accept and understand the richness of diversity, is fundamental. The illustrator wanted to express through the story of Monstruo Rosa, a big pink character in a world of small, white beings, her own personal experience as a lesbian woman, but she managed to go further by turning it into a tale about those who feel different, for whatever reason, and about the acceptance of others and of oneself.
As of Pink Monster Olga de Dios's career as an illustrator has been growing rapidly, but all her work in this field will maintain some of the characteristics we have seen in her first book, such as the following:
- Absolute prominence of colour. Experimentation
- Strength and visual impact
- Fresh, agile and spontaneous in appearance.
- Expressive stroke
- Striking, singular characters, with aesthetic originality.
- Empathetic connection with readers through the tenderness they exude.
- Optimism and positive energy
- Transmission of values and a vindicative spirit
Pink Monster gave rise to a collection in which each of the characters appearing at the end of the book is featured in one of the titles.
Thus, in 2015 Olga de Dios published the second book in the collection, Yellow bird. In this story, a little bird has such short wings that he cannot fly and every year he watches his friends migrate and travel to other places until, with the help of a friend, he invents propellers that work with solar energy, clean energy, of course, and starts a journey that will lead him to share his invention with the ostrich, the ostrich with the hen, the hen with the kiwi, the kiwi with the polar bear ... In this way, the illustrator introduces several important themes: disability, solidarity, sharing knowledge in freedom and even climate change with this bear that has to move in the face of the melting ice.In 2017 Olga de Dios published the third title of the collection, Three Eyed Frog.
This album tells the story of a frog who, on realising the degradation of the pond in which he has lived since he was born, tries to find a solution to recover his habitat. The book is not only a story that transmits to children the values of caring for our surroundings and respect for the environment through recycling and responsible consumption, but it also becomes a vindication of the important role played by environmental activists. With this book I wanted to pay tribute to the people who choose to risk everything to defend the environment. (Ruiz, 2018)
The main character, Three Eyed Frog, decides to take action to recover nature in the place where she lives by confronting a factory much bigger and much noisier than she is, and to do so she seeks the help of other characters, forming a team, something that we can understand as the struggle of activists from environmental associations against the giants of production in our societies of consumer capitalism. She does not give up and manages to change things through collaboration, that is the spirit that the illustrator transmits.
All of this through illustrations in which we can see that it maintains a stylistic line with Pink MonsterThe work has evolved towards greater complexity in some settings and in some characters, without renouncing the expressiveness that characterises his work.
Olga de Dios herself recognises this evolution in her aesthetics.
Although the graphic style of the illustrations is the same for all this collection, there is an evolution. It has been 5 years since I did the first book, during these years I have learned to think and draw differently. Now I make more effort in representation, in being more pedagogical in my drawings. In these latest illustrations you can identify types of trees, habitats or specific animals... (Barrionuevo, 2018).
The interest in a representation of pedagogical quality, in fact, was already present in the illustrations of Yellow Bird where, for example, the illustrator, without abandoning her fresh and informal style, takes care to characterise each species of bird that appears in a way that is true to nature.
At Pink MonsterIn his first book, the aim of reaching the public with a clear and direct message and the aesthetic concern in search of his own, original style made this greater verism unnecessary.
Blue Monster is, for the time being, the last title in the collection, seven years after the first one.. It was published in 2020, in the midst of confinement due to the spread of the coronavirus, and its appearance was an event in the world of children's literature, because it was expected by the children's public and because, coincidentally, its content touched on a sadly topical subject at a time when social distance was imposed; the importance of hugs, contact and listening in order to empathise with others.
Through the discovery of her protagonist, Blue Monster, of the power of listening to others as a motor for social change, the illustrator vindicates, as she herself tells us on her website, her commitment to a society in which respect, equality and empathy are fundamental principles and values for its sustainability.
We have highlighted the albums in the collection Pink Monster for two main reasons. One is that through them we can see a varied range of the themes that concern the author and that are the backbone of her combative artistic personality, and the other is that, by producing them at different times from 2013 to 2020, we can see in them, despite the evident and necessary continuity and stylistic coherence, an interesting formal evolution that can help us to understand her recent artistic facet.
But apart from the collection Pink MonsterOlga de Dios has published other children's albums in which we can also trace her eagerness for experimentation and her creative restlessness that have led her to the world of large format painting.
In this sense we can highlight the album Leotolda, published in 2016, in which the illustrator embarked on a risky experiment with colour, using only three pantone colours of fluorine inks, which, when seen in black light, acquire a strident luminosity, offering two aesthetic options in one. This original story anticipates some of the characteristics that we are going to find in her painting, such as the idea of understanding graphics as a game, the composition horror vacui The use of fluorescent colours allows for two different views, in natural light and in the dark with cold light (fig.2).
Fig. 2 Leotolda (2019), Olga de Dios. Source: Apila Ediciones.
In addition, following the publication of this book, Olga de Dios exhibited at Swinton Gallery (Madrid) copies of the book's illustrations in serial prints and original graphic work of the characters that appear in it, which was a first step in her exhibition career.
We should also highlight two other very recent titles published by the illustrator in the USA, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish (2020) y If you are a drag queen and you know it (2022). In both books, the text is a song and the illustrations are by the following artists drag queens seeking to bring the aesthetics of this collective closer to the world of children. This component of song, of celebration, is evident in the characters who dance animatedly, wiggling and waving their arms and legs, and is enhanced by the use of intense, vibrant, fun colour, in which purple, magenta, sky blue, turquoise... not only do they dance, but they transmit and spread their joy and optimism to the readers. This is the same effect that his paintings have on the viewers when they take risks with shocking colours and provocative aesthetics.
Olga de Dios and large format painting. Provocation
Throughout this brief overview of Olga de Dios's career as an illustrator, it has become clear that she is a restless, experimental and daring artist, who likes to face new challenges in each project, so it is easy to understand her incursion into the art world almost as a personal challenge and as a step forward in her career. A step she has taken in a natural way since the exhibitions of her characters at the Swinton Gallery in Madrid.
It will be there that he will hold his first major painting exhibition in May 2021, Cocktail Party Spray.
The exhibition consisted of a series of black ink drawings, a gallery of framed portraits of people and a collection of large-format works, including a polyptych of four panels and two large triptychs, made with acrylic spray, lacquer and glitter on board.
In her works, the artist depicts a world populated by well-defined characters in some cases and close to abstraction in others. Characters that emerge in an improvised, random way, from a spot of paint, a splash or even a drop or splash, to which the author gives life by adding eyes and mouths of great expressiveness.
Olga de Dios's fiesta is made with a technique, spray paint, which, because of its link with the street art and graffiti, is generally associated with the subversive. In this case it is a technique that allows the artist to work in a direct and gestural way, close to Abstract Expressionism, with which she also has the large format in common (fig.3).
Fig. 3 Olga de Dios in her studio. Source: Goyo Villasevil.
The author herself acknowledges that she is technically interested in Abstract Expressionism because of the visceral way of applying paint and how, from the results obtained in this spontaneous way, she can work on compositions or the creation of new characters (De Dios and Villasevil, 2021, p. 15).
Olga de Dios claims her feminist activism and manifests it in a provocative way by infiltrating into the action paintingThe movement was considered by art history as a movement with a markedly masculine character in which not only were women ignored, but it was also considered essentially masculine because of a supposed link between the brusque and violent manner of painting and virility.
The most impetuous informalism, action painting, already carries in its very essence a clear exclusion of what is traditionally and secularly associated with the feminine. We usually say he is a man of action, which implies that action is associated with the virile or masculine. Moreover, this concept of action is opposed to everything that, in the androcentric vision of the world, is appropriate for women, the calm, the interior, the static... it is more akin to the world and the poetics of women. In art, as in society, these attributes, emanating from patriarchal culture, will perennially mark the aesthetics and theory of art, limiting women's ability to create freely (Fernández, 2008, p.18).
Curiously enough, however, it was a woman who pioneered the dripping and the all over Olga de Dios's paintings; Janet Sobel, who, from 1937, before Pollock, used this device of randomly dripping paint and covering the entire canvas. On the other hand, we can observe that the work of Olga de Dios actually has more in common with the work of this artist than with that of Pollock, as it shares two important aesthetic characteristics with her that are not present in Pollock's work: the use of bright colours and the presence of the näif.
In any case, neither Pollock nor Sobel are directly alluded to by Olga de Dios. She does, however, allude to Antonio Saura.
The title of the exhibition alludes directly and intentionally to the series of mixed media works and silkscreen prints that under the name of Cocktail party by the Aragonese artist Antonio Saura in the 1960s and 1970s. This homage becomes a provocative wink with the addition of the word "Spray".
In Saura's works in this series, practically the entire surface is populated by deformed beings bordering on abstraction, in whom we can barely recognise a few features, faces that emerge, as in the paintings of Olga de Dios, as a result of placing eyes on shapeless, random and irrational patches of colour (fig.4).
Fig. 4 Cocktail Party (1960), Antonio Saura. Source: Museum of Abstract Art of Cuenca.
The artist shares with Saura, Informalism and Abstract Expressionism the creative freedom and liberation of forms and also incorporates meanings into her work, beyond the merely artistic, which connect with the current social reality.
In his exhibition there is a key work, the triptych titled Welcome Party. Through it we understand the meaning of the exhibition, the celebration of diversity, a party to which we are all invited, whatever our culture, race, gender, identity or sexual orientation (fig.5).
Fig. 5 Welcome Party (2021), Olga de Dios. Source: Goyo Villasevil.
That is the reason why there is something fundamental that characterises the works exhibited; optimism, a contagious optimism, the characters invite you, include you, provoke you?
Look, as a woman and a lesbian, I have faced many adversities in life, and I didn't want to give up the party, which I understand as an attitude towards life, to not be paralysed, to always go forward with life and the struggle and demands (Ruiz, 2021).
This joy is transmitted to a great extent through colour. Fluorine, vibrant colours, bubblegum pink, phosphorescent oranges, fuchsias, intense purples, light blue, yellows, acid greens... which are enhanced with the use of glitter.
This use of colour and the playful, groundbreaking sense of playfulness are reminiscent of Pop. Olga de Dios achieves something unusual in this way; fusing two styles that were once opposed and irreconcilable.
Even though with notable differences, the reminiscence of Pop, together with the positive sentiment, the fun, the horror vacui, the link with illustration, the childish and the use of colour are characteristics that his artistic work shares with Takashi Murakami's Japanese Superflat current (fig.6).
Fig. 6 Cocktail Party Spray #19 (2021), Olga de Dios. Source: Goyo Villasevil.
If there is one word that captures the trend that is the sign of our times in art and design, it is eclecticism and, without doubt, the work of Olga de Dios has the difficult virtue of fusing previous styles in an effective and, parodically, original and novel way.
Transit and linking art and illustration
From the journey we have made through Olga de Dios' work as an illustrator, we have been able to see that this facet shares characteristics with her work as an artist, such as the following:
- The importance of the stroke and the gestural despite the technical differences in execution. The expressive force, achieved in illustration with his drawings, sometimes in the form of streaks that in art become spots, squirts and drips, in both cases producing a fresh, informal, fun result with a certain childlike air.
- The use of intense, vibrant, contrasting, explosive colour...
– El horror vacui, elegantly dosed in the illustrations combined with simple compositions and brought to its maximum expression in the paintings.
This approach from the aesthetics of his books to the world of painting has been progressive and understandable as an evolution since his first titles. The relationship between the colourful and overcrowded scenario of elements and characters of the first pages of Blue Monster (2020) and the tables of Cocktail Party Spray (2021) is already easy to see. Although in this case, the differences are also evident. The naturalism of the illustration has been replaced by stranger and more surreal characters in his paintings, the colour palette has intensified, the balanced composition has become chaotic, and the calm and peaceful appearance has become one of almost euphoric strength and energy. In short, he has created his own particular style as a large-format artist.
Another important link between illustration and painting is that both are populated by characters with stories to tell. Recognisable characters that appear in both worlds (such as rainbows, clouds or cacti) or shapeless beings closer to abstraction in most of his paintings, in which the protagonism lies in their big eyes and smiling or open mouths.
In his first book, Pink MonsterThe characters introduce us to a "WONDERFUL PLACE", but it is precisely in the last of the collection, Blue Monsterin which the characters hatch in that place where the stones, the clouds, the plants, the trees... have eyes and mouths with the same expressions as in his pictorial work (Fig.7).
Fig. 7 Blue Monster (2020), Olga de Dios. Source: Apila Ediciones.
The main character of the book, Blue Monster, learned to listen and made his friends stop and listen to others and realise that they could use their different skills and abilities to help and make others happy. In this way they managed to turn that wonderful PLACE into a BETTER PLACE. (Olga de Dios, 2020)
In his paintings the characters, undoubtedly, live in that "better PLACE", in that place where diversity and integration become a party, a celebration, a "better place". Cocktail Party Spray.
Conclusions
We can say that the transition between illustration and art in the case of Olga de Dios has been easy, fluid and even logical.
In fact, it is not a one-way street, as the author is currently working intensively on painting and, at the same time, on an album in which the main character comes from her portrait gallery. Both worlds feed aesthetically into each other in her work and share a character of provocative social vindication, which is the trait that identifies Olga de Dios.
The artist has managed to break down the boundaries between art and illustration, to eliminate the limit of childishness, her illustrations and artworks convey a message intuitively and move children and adults alike, and to address a broad spectrum of audiences to speak of values and social change in a positive, inclusive and optimistic, vindicating and provocative way, making William Morris's maxim her own: I don't want art for the few, just as I don't want education or freedom for the few. (Morris, 1884).
On many occasions, the art market or the cultural industry establishes an abysmal distance from the public, turning artistic production into something aimed at an exclusive public. In my way of understanding the world, and therefore my profession, I try to break that distance and bring my work closer to many people, so that they can interpret it, read it, enjoy it and live it (De Dios and Villasevil, 2021, p. 24).
From the books, their protagonists involve us in the collective struggle for a better and fairer world, and from the paintings, their characters look at us and invite us to participate with their smiles in the celebration of diversity, making us irremediably accomplices in both cases (fig.8).
Fig. 8 Spray Cocktail Party #21 (2021), Olga de Dios. Source Goyo Villasevil.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
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De Dios, Olga and Villasevil, Goyo: "Una fiesta para todos los públicos". In: Cocktail Party Sprayexhibition catalogue (Madrid, 2021). Madrid: Self-published by Olga de Dios, 2021.
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Fernández, Andrea, When the essence is masculine. Gender and Sex in Informalism and Abstract Expressionism. Alicante: Centre for Women's Studies. University of Alicante, 2008.
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