Picture Book Report

Short Reports: Rodrigo Avilés vs. One Hundred Years of Solitude

August 12, 2010 at 12:21 pm meg 8 comments

Sorry for the silence, folks! Here is a Short Report coming all the way from Chile– meet Rodrigo Avilés, and then scope out his lovely portfolio and blog. He has chosen the classic novel by Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

(click to enlarge)

They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew only their own language, handsome specimens with oily skins and intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed a panic of uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and the multi-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that José Arcadio Buendía must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all. In an instant they transformed the village. The inhabitants of Macondo found themselves lost in their own streets, confused by the crowded fair.

This scene is when José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of Macondo, tries to see his friend Melquiades the gypsy again. Gypsies had always visited Macondo and introduced the population to many wonders; this time José Arcadio and his sons discover the existence of Ice, considered by him as “the great invention of our time.”
 
I chose One Hundred Years of Solitude because it is a story that reflects the human condition very well, through the story of the village of Macondo and the genealogy of the Buendia family (through its miracles, obsessions, tragedies, adulteries and discoveries). The book has the essence of old oral narrative: unbelievable things are told as something mundane or real at the time, in an aesthetic known as “magic realism”. They are great characters, and the story can be interpreted as a metaphor of the South American history.
 
I’m Rodrigo Avilés, an illustrator and comic artist from the small city of Melipilla, Chile. I’ve worked coloring comics for various publications here in my country, but  I also color some graphic novels for Image Comics. I want to start working on my own comics too! Aside from comics, I like editorial, children and fantasy illustration. For this illustration I did the drawing on paper, inked it on Manga Studio and colored in Photoshop. I usually experiment with styles and jump between traditional and digital media.

Entry filed under: Short Reports. Tags: onehundredyearsofsolitude, rodrigoaviles.