Where did I get my passion for illustration from?
This is going to be a very personal blog post, I am going to expose the deepest secret behind my passion for illustration, haha! In fact, I already shared a little about this here in this project.
I am feeling quite nostalgic and I am happy to look at these illustrations that I once was and still am excited about. I feel quite weird of being obsessed about this manual, but here I am. I have a very strong respect for the artist/artists: Simion Morărescu and Elvira Morărescu.
I once shared in an infographic that I was about 7 years old when I got this book full of illustrations at school. I was in first grade and because when you are in first grade you don’t know how to write or read yet, the book had to be full of illustrations. Which is amazing! So this manual is nothing but illustrations and is from the communist era of Romania. I am a Hungarian and the book is for the Hungarian minority living in Romania. The topics are quite lovely, the book has a sweet feeling that I can’t really explain. When I look at this book with these illustrations I do nothing but smile, it brings me back to that time and somehow it doesn’t bring back the memories, it brings back a tiny little piece of that feeling I had back in time. Have you ever experienced such thing?
When I was in first grade, everything was new to me, school was very new to me! The building, the kids, the schoolmarm, the books, the notebooks, the pencils, the erasers, the markers, the blackboards and the lessons. The numbers, the letters, the pen and ink, the inky stains, the homework, the bell, the breaks, the smell of the classroom mixed with nervous feelings, the smell of books and the smell of chalks, the perfume of the schoolmarm, the snack we ate at 10 o’clock. The most intense was September, the first days of autumn and the school year. It always rained. I remember the feeling of being lost in the crowd of kids on the first day of the school year, being happy and anxious at the same time. Years later on these days I was wondering how my classmates changed, they had longer hair and they spent the holidays in different places. We all had to talk about what we did in those 3 months of the summer. I remember of being nervous each day waking up and learning to put everything in my schoolbag. I didn’t want to miss a thing, I was disciplined to always do what they say. And there was this book full of illustrations, and our schoolmarm was a great one! We had to draw the illustrations we saw in the book in our notebook and this way we would learn the words in Romanian. I don’t know how to explain this, I felt like this was the best thing to do!
So I really believe this is the reason I am so passionate today about illustration, in fact I always was.
Let me tell you what I like about these illustrations: all the topics, everything that we experience is illustrated in a beautiful way. Lot of elements, objects, animals, plants, school, family, food, and seasons. All of these illustrated in a lovely vintage style!
If you want to check out the whole manual, follow this link.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about a book that is very dear to me and I am curious of your favorite books, feel free to share them with me!
With love,
Jean