New York, October 23 A Spanish illustrator and writer has just published a book with her particular vision of New York told through ten characters who, as she puts it, “were transformed by the city and ended up transforming it themselves”.
With “New York is the thing” (Mont Ventoux) Patricia Bolaños, who has lived in the Big Apple for six years, wants to pay homage to a city portrayed in hundreds of films and novels, but rarely with such an original mix of illustrations and a text by support unrelated to any solemnity and, as he says in an interview with EFE, “as far as possible from the tone of Wikipedia”.
Trained as an architect, Bolaños (37) never practiced that profession, and soon realized that drawing was his passion: he started illustrating wedding invitations, until he got tired of repetitions, and then six years ago he moved to New York where he started working mainly illustrating fashion magazines.
At the same time, she was filling her instagram with drawings she had made of the city, until one day, when her account had 7,000 followers (today she has five times as many), an unknown publishing house called her from Madrid to offer her to create. a book full of his illustrations, recounting his “vision of New York”.
That job took him two years. And he called it “New York is the thing”, despite being written in Spanish, in homage to another pro New Yorker like Pattie Smith and her famous poem with that title in which she proclaims that the city “seduced, formed, deformed , perverted and converted.
TEN UNIQUE INDIVIDUALS
Bolaños had between twenty or thirty lines of characters in New York, a city that abounds with unique or simply extravagant, more or less grandiose individuals. The publisher was asking for an effort at synthesis, but how to extract its essence in ten profiles that are large in their own way, which would define the city?
Eventually, she chose the most diverse palette she could imagine, in professions, neighborhoods, races, social status or sexual options. There is glamor and there is squalor. Filmmakers, writers and poets, screenwriters, designers or LGBT activists go through her book. Some of them were multiple things at once. There are Truman Capote, Nora Ephron, Spike Lee …
What did they have in common? “Everyone found in New York a place where they could be or get what they couldn’t be or get in any other city in the world,” writes the author.
The book is opened by photographer Bill Cunningham, a man who stopped at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street every morning to photograph the diverse wildlife that would sooner or later pass by. Today they would call him a “trend hunter”, but the truth is that his mere presence has encouraged many fashion stars to go out just to be photographed by Cunningham (by the way, black and very austere life).
A MATTER OF STYLE ALSO IN THE TEXTS
In Bolaños’s book, even the letters chosen have their own style: contrary to usual, the titles are in lowercase (with her own handwriting) and the texts in uppercase, written among other things with a typeface created by herself.
The typology of the drawings, reminiscent of the covers of the legendary magazine The New Yorker, is inspired by a cartoonist that Bolaños admires, Maira Kalman – another New Yorker by choice of life -, and the author also mentions another Spanish colleague, Ilu Ros, among the illustrators who are the reference, or the recently deceased Sempé.
All the illustrations that fill the book were digitally created in two years (pandemic included) with the Pro Create program on your iPad. Drawings, texts, titles, page layouts … even the layout itself was defined by you and sent to Madrid in the form of a file.
“New York is the thing” just went up for sale in Spain, but its author would like to be able to sell it in the city she honors, if she can convince a local publisher. She also promises her another book with her vital adventures in the Big Apple from a blog she has had for years. In the meantime, you have just illustrated a French book on fantastic architecture …
The fast pace of a unique city has caught up with him.
Javier Otazu
