Month: June 2022

For the Positions Through Contextualizing brief, I chose to explore the formal qualities of the Codex Borbonicus, an Aztec book comprised on illustrations about their daily life, mythology and religious ceremonies. The goal of the project was to generate a new interpretation of their illustrative style, and use it to tell a contemporary story.

I began by exploring the way in which the Aztecs illustrated fish, and from there evolved my practice to illustrating one of their gods, Huitzilopochtli. The idea was to take inspiration from artists such as Steven Harrington, whose style reflects a subculture but also transcends its form to have universal appeal.

From there, the project evolved through the lens of adhocism and the authors’ discussion of chimeras. The Aztec gods themselves are portrayed as chimeras; all are shown wearing animal regalia and furs, and are described as possessing the characteristics of the animal themselves. I began by illustrating Huitzilopochtli, a god who is half human, half hummingbird, with the goal of creating a new codex of Aztec gods that contemporary audiences could read and understand.

The experiment fell short of my experimentations however, so I decided that, if the goal is to create something for a contemporary audience, the content must also be contemporary. To this end, and using the idea of chimeras as inspiration for the characters, I chose to illustrate Bernie Madoff, dressed in a suit but wearing a headdress of a vulture and holding a snake scepter. This did not work either as it was both anachronistic and confusing.

The next iteration moved on from Bernie Madoff, who was seen to be too obscure a figure, to Donald Trump, the epitome of a chimera, half man, half clown. I chose to portray him, as well as Melania Trump and Don Jr., as actual chimeras on playing cards. I thought the recognizable duality of the form worked well and would be easily understandable to a modern audience. In all three illustrations, the top half of the card is a likeness of the character, while the bottom half is a stylized illustration of the monster or animal that mirrors their person.

This iteration of the work also caused confusion because the color scheme was thought to be too bright to be understood as negative, and the choice of Trump as a character generated a negative reaction. Other iterations which relied more on caricature and a more obvious grotesqueness, were seen as more successful.

To my mind, the project has not yet resolved in a meaningful iteration. A new illustration is coming together that is closer to the mark, which uses the illustrative conventions of previous iterations but is further informed by political cartoons.

My project began as a way to explore how cultural specificity can be developed into a style of illustration. My initial iterations are inspired by the Coronel Aureliano Buendia, the main character of the novel Cien años de soledad by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

After losing 32 successive battles, the defeated Coronel retires and dedicates the rest of his life to making small fish out of gold. Each fish he makes he then melts down and remakes, in successive infinite iterations until he dies. My 100 iterations are 100 slightly different ways of drawing the same fish, using various textures, pens, lines, shadows, and effects. Based on these initial drawings, I began researching the history of design in Latin America, hoping to find a style of illustration that would communicate the same cultural specificity of the novel and capture the rich amalgamation of art and design tendencies that define the region.

In order to anchor my project in an authentic and culturally specific aesthetic, I began experimenting with the way in which pre-hispanic cultures illustrated their histories in both written and sculptural form. These initial iterations helped define specific forms, shapes, patterns and colors that are central to pre-hispanic designs and as such will form the basis of new iterations going forward.

Fish based on Music designs

Fish based on Mayan Designs