Six/Seis
Six/Seis explores the work and sketchbooks of Spanish illustrator Jesus Cisneros. The book is broken into six sections: Themes, Series, Memory, Exploration, Accidents and Fiction. This illustration book contains a series of interviews with Jesús in both English and Spanish.
Jesús actively uses his sketchbook as a way of exploring themes including nature, animals and the human body. Notions of the mythical and imaginary are recurrent themes in his work and are explored through a series of essays and visual references.
The use of folklore imagery and different drawing styles and techniques are explored in this dual language book that contains original artwork and sketchbook pages.
‘Drawing allows one to envision the world differently and I enjoy that very much. There is also an important element of fiction throughout my work; even those motifs seemingly taken from nature are made up. Some themes clearly belong to fantasy; these are the ones that would be part of that body of work that Hokusai dedicated to spirits and dreams. I have, for example, approached the topic of ‘monsters’ that we find in myths and fables, in literature and film, and which can be read on several levels: anthropologically, socially and/or politically. Individual imagination joins the collective one. That’s why there are endless and universal themes.’
Jesús Cisneros
About this edition
This edition allows the reader to explore the depth and breadth of the work of Cisneros with the work placed in rough thematic groupings. The motifs and themes of the work emerge through this clustering of ideas and themes presenting a new understanding of the works and the role of the sketchbook in relation to the illustrator.
“I’ll begin by saying that I usually draw ‘by heart’, i.e., I am not used to having a model in front of me, whether a real one or a photograph; therefore the act of drawing is, in a way, a search in which my memory and my imagination are involved. To put it simply, when I draw a tree I am, somehow, recalling trees that I have once seen, and, at the same time, creating a new one on paper.”
Jesús Cisneros