Explain Ferdinand Vincent (Madrid, 1963) that, when looking for a cover for the amazing and incredibly voluminous monograph dedicated to him Editorial Standard, His first impulse was to create an unprecedented illustration from scratch that could summarize four decades of trade. Forty years surrounded by brushes and jam jars turned into paint cans and a lifetime dedicated to drawing and illustration. To the comic, the press and the album covers. To ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Dangerous Liaisons’. The problem, he adds, is that nothing he could think of improved an existing work: the poster he made in 2015 for the Madrid Book Fair.
The crush on reading, captured in a magnetically attractive image that now greets you from the cover of ‘The art of Fernando Vicente’, an anthology that gathers more than 500 works in 360 pages. “It speaks a little about my love for books,” says the illustrator from Madrid. And if this story is about something, it is precisely about that: unconditional love for books and excessive passion for some titles that he has been illuminating for fifteen years with his drawings and illustrations. “That’s where I feel most comfortable,” admits an artist who, after transitioning from comics to advertising and from the rush of the daily and weekly press to poster art, has found a refuge in the illustrated versions of great works of literature. to measure.
Illustration for the Writing School of the Barcelona Athenaeum
«They have pigeonholed me a bit in the classics. You illustrate ‘Dracula’ and then they tell you that, of course, you also have to do ‘Frankenstein’. And from ‘Mansfield Park’ you normally go on to ‘Wuthering Heights’, he explains. The list, a true who’s who of universal literature, already adds more than thirty references and includes titles such as ‘Alice through the looking glass’, ‘Momo’, ‘The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide’, ‘ Treasure Island’, ‘`Poet in New York’, ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘The Communist Manifesto’…
“I have also worked with living authors”, he stresses before recalling his collaboration with Arturo Pérez Reverte (‘The Civil War told to young people’, ‘El pequeño Hoplita’) or Marta Sanz (‘Altarpiece’). ‘Gone with the Wind’, with its thousand pages and 60 illustrations, is one of the last published works by an author who, unable to sit still (“last year I made 380 drawings, more than one a day” , informs), he is already immersed in the illustrated version of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’.
«My crazy dream would be to make ‘Moby Dick’, although there are already several illustrated editions – he fantasizes -. Also ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, although when I proposed it they told me that it was not the time ». The secret of your success? The beauty that all his drawings pursue. “Even the most unpleasant things I try to bring to less arid ground,” she says.
comic without vocation
However, the one of the illustrated books It is just one chapter, the last, of a career (and now also of a book) that began in the eighties in magazines such as ‘Madriz’ ‘La Luna…’ and began to strengthen ties with books and writers in the pages of ‘El País’, ’eme21magazine’ and ‘Letras libres’, among other publications. «I started in comics without wanting to do comics», assures about his first works. Perhaps that is why he has never considered returning to the genre. “I’ve never had a proposal,” he notes. In addition, he adds, he is aware that he lacks the ‘author’s vocation’ that his friends like Javier Olivares do have. “When I was doing comics, I realized that I needed a scriptwriter: I have never known how to do that part,” he admits.
Illustrated Classics
Since it premiered in 2006 with ‘Peter Pan’, Fernando Vicente has specialized in illustrating universal literature classics. ‘Momo’, ‘The man who could reign’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The dog of the Baskervilles’, ‘Dracula’ or ‘The metamorphosis’ are some of the titles that have passed through his hands
Seasoned for a decade as an art director for an advertising agency, Vicente has spent the last decades living and drawing between books. “Coming from advertising, I don’t have the bohemia associated with painters: I arrive at the studio at nine in the morning to have fun and leave at nine at night,” he explains. Always standing, almost always with several drawings running at the same time. “My colleagues have cervical problems, I suffer from lumbar problems,” he admits.
Even so, if he has some free time, he grabs his stuff and goes out into the street to continue painting from nature. “What I am going to do? Stay at home watching TV? asks an author who, like almost all creators, walks a bit uneasy about the incursion of Artificial intelligence in different artistic disciplines, illustration included. “I don’t know if she is a threat, but something is happening that we didn’t know about. It’s like when the Internet came along, we didn’t know what it was either and now we can’t live without it. What I don’t know is what this will end up with: he has a point that he equals everything and does terribly tacky things, ”she says.