The holiday season naturally brings to mind memories of childhood Christmases past, long ago, when for many of us the best gift was what would be called a “picture book.” In 2021, this sounds terribly quaint indeed. 

Today, many gifts for even the youngest recipients seem aimed at developing STEM skills and laying the foundation for a career in high tech.  And while we may marvel at (and be grateful for) the ability of a digital-native 10-year-old to unlock our frozen email account, the picture-book has in fact never been more essential. And for this, we must be grateful for the contemporary genius of Violeta Lópiz, an award-winning, Ibiza-born illustrator now living in Peru.

Of her work, The New York Times wrote “Its territory is at the liminal zone not only between picture-book and avant-garde illustrated book, but also between youth and adulthood.” Lópiz herself says, “Picture books are very special objects, they are like songs, or like little films. All of them look very simple, but when I tried to do them, I found out that they are really complex things.”

Working with pencils, markers, watercolors, acrylics, wax, collage, oils and embossing on plastics, fabrics, and paper, Lópiz possesses a modern, mid-century cool, at times suggesting the witty and endearing style of Alice and Martin Provensen.

The artist’s uniquely fresh perspective is evident in her illustrations for “True Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked For It”, Enchanted Lion /Unruly Press, 2021, an unusual feminist re-telling of a traditional Spanish folk-tale, rediscovered and brought to new life by Violeta Lópiz and author Ana Cristina Herreros. The book was so precedent-setting that the publisher, Enchanted Lion, created a new imprint, Unruly, as the space in which to offer it.

The story begins with this provocative proposition: “What comes to swallow us up?” Using a strikingly limited palette of beige, blue, red, black and white, Lópiz depicts the opportunistic suitors of an enterprising female mouse as seemingly harmless household objects.  After several experiments, she decided to paint the images on large pieces of fabric, sizable enough to allow her to work while standing. Lópiz worked on the illustrations for 7 years.

Whether a tea-kettle, a blow-dryer or a pair of scissors, these familiar objects magnify and often distort the mouse’s vision of herself, much as domestic tedium and patriarchy have done for generations in the lives of women. In the end, the mouse is devoured by a cat which first approached her as a sweetly meowing kitten.  Initially, the kitten attempts to locate some thread to stitch up his injured and bleeding mouse-wife. However, the illustrations depict the kitten growing into a tom-cat that Lópiz identifies as an abuser, tangling in the snarls of thread that she says symbolize repeated rejection and building resentment.

This grisly climax of the narrative is concealed behind white double-gatefolds. The author, Herreros, has commented, “In some ways, the belly of the cat is the cave of initiation, from which you stop being a girl and become a woman. Because this story, like all stories, is a rite of passage.” At this point, the reader may pause and wonder, is this really a children’s book after all?

As in the work of Maurice Sendak, the magic of childhood seen through the eyes of Lópiz is in fact a sort of strangeness.  Eschewing the saccharine, Lópiz excels in depicting a quiet heroism. While her art is often tranquil, there is an acknowledgement of risk, danger, and dark moments.

Through a series of email conversations, Soolip recently had the pleasure of conversing with Violeta Lópiz in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. 

Lópiz says, “My studio now is at home, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in the bedroom, or in between. My motherhood has coincided with many changes including the change of the continent where I live. So, I ́m slowly creating a place to work.”

Of her own childhood in Ibiza, she recalls, “I remember a lot of freedom and curiosity for animals, flowers, beach... I was angry when someone weeded the plants, because I thought those plants were beautiful too. I loved to climb the fig tree and to hide inside of it. Every single stone or drop of water had a lot of meaning for me.”

The artist’s parents moved her to the city-life of Madrid when she was 5 years old.  She wasn’t a fan, and initially retreated inside the family apartment. She comments that the soles of her feet no longer felt strong, and that she felt awkward about shedding her clothes to swim at the beach. Happily, Lópiz soon made a new friend, and that bond restored her restless spirit and connection with the natural world. She describes it this way: “The world was filled with light again.”

Now, she begins her day by trying to remember dreams from the night before. Like a chef’s mise en place, she tidies her space, and the work begins: “I fill the glasses with water and I start to paint anything. I need to paint little characters, circles, lines, stains, just to say hello to my hands. In the same way, I take my notebook and I do sketches and write any idea that appears in my head.”

A point of reference in the conceptualization of “True Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked For It” was the work of German dancer and choreographer Philippine “Pina” Bausch, who amazed audiences with her dance-theatre works including the 1985 work, Café Müller, where the performers keep their eyes closed and stumble around the stage crashing into tables and chairs. When Lópiz lived in Berlin, her home for 10 years, she says that she loved to walk in the city’s many parks without her eyeglasses. She says, “Without them, I felt more vulnerable and awake at the same time. I saw the light and shadows distorted, moving in the floor like water. The sounds took a bigger role, and I was not distracted with the people, because I couldn’t see any faces. I also tried to close my eyes while I was biking through the park, in the night, when there was no one. I fell down many times, and I laughed, alone, by myself.”

Lópiz is the mother of a baby daughter, Luz. She describes their lives in the countryside of Valle Sagrado (“Sacred Valley”), in Cuzco “…in the middle of the corn and strawberry fields.” The child’s father, grandfather and uncles farm the surrounding land.  She explains that she was magnetically drawn to the pre-Conquest arts of Peru’s indigenous Moche culture for many years before arriving in Valle Sagrado, and with no expectation of becoming a mother. She says, “Let me tell you something that I find very curious. I fell in love with pre-Hispanic Peruvian art, without having been in Peru or having had any idea of this art before. The paintings on ceramic or the drawings on fabric gave me an inexplicable feeling of curiosity and joy. Well, I need to say that this love for Peruvian art made me travel to Peru, and here I am!”

Lópiz explains that she missed her family in Spain while expecting and welcoming daughter Luz, but Covid-19 made travel to Europe impossible. Still, she says she feels lucky: “I spent the time with my little newborn, breathing pure air and eating well.” She says that she’s rebuilding her approach to work, and now spends more time writing about her own roots and childhood than painting. True to her child’s name—“Luz” means “light”—Lópiz says “My daughter brought me much more clearness and intuition.”

The promise of magic is standard fare for the writers, illustrators and readers of children’s books. Fairytales both old and new simmer and sparkle with spells, curses, magic beans, poison apples, ruby slippers, maniacal red dancing shoes with a wicked will all their own, cannibal witches beckoning from confectionary houses, and supernatural beings and handsome princes that swoop in at the last possible moment to resolve the impossible.

But Lópiz does not externalize magic, nor does she portray magic as other-ness. Her work is a reminder of the English word “familiar”, used in the context of traditional British witchcraft. Celtic witches of yore entrusted their practice to a helpful animal companion, often a black cat. These familiar spirits offered help by shape-shifting, and assuming protective forms as needed. Kitchens and hearths were the humble sites for conjuring. Local herbs were gathered for their curative powers, and fortunes were told by cracking open a hen’s egg. The classic witch’s broom, as well as the flying mortar-and-pestle of Russian grandmother-sorceress Baba Yaga, further hint at the domestic ordinary-ness of magic in past centuries.

Confronted with the modern world, the genius of Lópiz as an illustrator is two-fold: first, to capture the salient detail of the ordinary, and second, to interpret those details into a narrative which effortlessly expands and opens into the archetypal. This transformation is carried out via imagery as close to home as the flight of a bird across a city skyline, or the silvery trail of a snail crossing a wet stone on the garden path.

In the world of Violeta Lópiz, magic is organic. Magic enters the scene easily and naturally, without artificial devices, deux ex machina, or fanfare. In her series of drawings about dreaming, for example, glowing spheres emanate from the imaginations of children themselves, to guide their way, as guardians through the underworld of sleep, into the unknown. How different this is from conventional children’s storytelling, where illumination enters the tale from an outside source.

The artist’s powers of physical observation and profound relationship with the natural world – rain dripping from leaves, the stretch of a cat, familiar human postures and gestures in a thousand moments of the everyday, the movement of shadows across an afternoon – bring a tremendous intimacy to her work.

At first glance, her art appears simple, because the scenes are not peopled by fantastical wizards and dragons, but rather by people we think we may have met. For instance, a drawing she created as an illustration for the poem called “Amigos do Pieto” by Portuguese poet Cláudio Thebas shows a lone character leaning on a railing over a vast expanse of sky, or sea—we’re not sure. A turquoise-roofed bar and café offers little comfort. The tiled plaza is abandoned, shared only by a couple who sit some distance from each other at one of the café tables, not touching. A single note of warmth is the thin black cat that presses against the legs of the solitary observer.

We cannot help but feel that we, too, have stood there against that railing, or pensively stirred a coffee while seated at one of those lonely, gusty tables. Of this scene, Lópiz describes “…the crazy wind on the Rua dos Industriais, and the alarm to change the firefighter’s shift; the smell is the wet streets of Lisbon and the ink of master Marçai’s studio; the taste of quince, requeijão and Portuguese stew.” With characteristic humility, Lópiz recalls, “I liked the text because of its simplicity. I thought it was so simple that it could illustrate it quickly – something that I often try, but never manage to achieve.”

Magic enters her reality as easily as one of the cats she often draws, soft, and in silence. In this way, Lópiz shows us that magic is immediate and accessible, not somewhere “out there” but utterly within us, waiting to illuminate us and protect us. But far too often, as the mouse-wife discovers in “True Story of a Mouse That Never Asked For It”, we all get “swallowed up.”  We grow up, we turn away, and we forget. At Christmas, we may purchase a picture-book for a young person and feel a sudden, inexplicable pang.

Finally, this is the enduring power of the humble picture-book. And this is also why the best illustrations originally drawn for children—Sir John Tenniel’s Alice, William Nicholson’s velveteen rabbit, Maurice Sendak’s Max – linger vividly in the memories of grown-ups long after youth has passed. 

Often, these characters are persistent in their need to be seen, heard, and acknowledged. They may converse with us in the dream-state, or cross into our daylight consciousness when we least expect them to visit (often when we’re trying to be our most adult selves).  The art of Violeta Lópiz strikes a bell-like chime in our remembering, calling us into a lucid space where suddenly, we again encounter the mystery of our being through the transparent eyes of a child.

All photographs courtesy of the author.