The journal · Inspiration
Romanian illustrators worth knowing
Sneakers drawn as spacecraft, a hedgehog on a bicycle, cities inked building by building. Nine illustrators and what each one is really doing.
Romanian illustration has no single look, which is the first thing worth saying, because countries with a famous style tend to produce a lot of imitation.
What is here instead is fifty-eight people with almost nothing in common. Here are nine of them, and what you are actually looking at.
Ghica Popa
Draws sneakers as vehicles. A Stan Smith on wheels parked on a tennis line, an Air Max descending through cloud with a flag on the roof, a Jordan in orbit with the cement print reading as hull plating.
His own description of his work mentions robots, industrial rivets and square space vehicles, which is accurate and still undersells it. There are tiny people standing next to these machines, to scale, and the scale is what makes the joke land.
Cristina Barsony
A hedgehog on a bicycle, leaves flying, no helmet and no doubts. That one print probably explains her better than a paragraph.
The rest is gardens that have grown past the edge of the picture, women whose dresses turn into meadows halfway down, and a great deal of very patient botanical detail. Warm without being sweet, which is a narrow path to walk.
Vali Petridean
Paints scenes that are almost normal. Four figures in ordinary clothes hanging on swings above the rooftops. A house and a locomotive built as one object, with a ladder up to the front door. A red double-decker in the rain with every window lit and nobody at them.
Nothing is announced as strange. The strangeness is just the situation, painted carefully.
Irina Dobrescu
Watercolour, and stories that assume you will stay a while. A cake the size of a field with people the size of berries walking on it. A maze from above, where the people inside clearly have no such advantage. A crowd in the rain seen from overhead, turned into a field of umbrellas.
Her own line about the work is that it turns quiet everyday moments into little constellations, which is the rare case of an artist statement being exactly right.
Livia Coloji
Fables, drawn as if the fable were a real afternoon. The fox flattering the crow. The piper leading a whole medieval town out through the gate. A child in a yellow raincoat in a flooded street, holding a toy boat carefully above the water.
Good for a child's room and completely wasted if you only put it there.
Bucuresti Optimixed
Not one person. A collective project that mixes photography and illustration: real Bucharest streets, photographed, with drawn creatures living in them.
A paper house drifting over the blocks at night. Something with tentacles using the slide in a playground after dark. Four snowmen playing cards in the park. The photograph makes the drawing credible, which is the whole trick.
Roxana Tanase
A gang of animals in watercolour, each with a job: the godfather with a pipe, the musician in a bow tie, the new one in a striped shirt who does not yet know where to put his hands.
Elsewhere, penguins queueing at a whale, and small dark creatures with enormous eyes and no idea where they are. Funny in a dry way that does not depend on a caption.
Sorina Vazelina
Cities drawn in isometric, building by building, until there is no room left between them. A street of shop signs in black line where the shoppers are almost lost.
She also drew the weekly grocery shop, item by item, brands included. It should not work as a picture and it does.
Sebastian Oprita
Paints tractors with the care usually reserved for portraits. A yellow one on spoked wheels, a steam tractor with the chimney intact, a milk truck with LAPTE on the tank from a time when that was the whole delivery.
Then, in the same hand, houses that could not be built: three stacked into one, a plant on every level.
The other forty-nine
That is nine out of fifty-eight, and the choice says more about how much space a paragraph takes than about who deserves one.
The rest are on the artists page, each with their own work gathered in one place. If you would rather start from the pictures than from the names, the shop is the other door into the same room.
Read next
