Very often, just like in those tales we love so much, the most significant figures are like the shooting stars crossing the firmament on summer nights. But if we are fortunate enough to see them we will never forget about them. That’s the way the work from illustrator Francisco Melendez is for me, like long tail that me and other illustrators from my generation try to follow.

This article about the hidden but not completely forgotten figure of Francisco Melendez. It is the result of a conjunction of elements, after the Spanish illustrator Jacobo Muñiz mentioned him in his blog. When I saw the name of Melendez on the screen I jumped on the chance to sort out what was the news about this genius author who influenced me so much during my first stages as an illustrator. Jacobo and I decided that it was necessary to give a little exposure to the work of Francisco Melendez on the net, in order to recover the memory of his unique work. Jacobo has also been very generous to post a Spanish translation of this same article in his blog.

I ran into the works by Francisco Melendez in 1989 through one of his many illustration works for the Spanish publishing company SM: “El Valle de los Cocuyos”. This beautiful and highly recommendable children story of magic literature by the pen of the Colombian writer Gloria Cecilia Díaz Ortiz was awarded with the Barco de Vapor prize in 1985. It contains some of the most beautiful, delicate and intense illustrations that I had seen in many years.

“El Valle de los Cocuyos”

That’s the way I fell in love with Francisco Melendez´s illustrations. Since that moment on, I bought each and every book I’d find with his drawings, including several children books for the Spanish publishing company Espasa Calpe.

One of the wonders that Melendez ever produced are the illustrations for “The Nutcracker”, published by Montena in 1987. It is true that I’ve always been a fan of E.T.A. Hoffmann and the music work by Tchaikovsky, but in my view the illustrations for this book with their delicate pencil drawings are still some of the most beautiful illustration works ever published in Spain.

“El Cascanueces y el Rey de los Ratones”

There´s not much to say about Francisco Melendez´s persona and maybe this was helpful to add mystery to his career. He was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1964. He left school as a teenager to enter the army, where he spent just a few months. He was close to take a ship to travel the world but in the last second he fell in love and decided to stay in Spain.

Francisco Melendez started working as an illustrator in 1983, since he was commissioned to do the drawings for an ecology book for which he was apparently scammed. From that moment on, he worked to many different projects for the institutions in Aragon. Personally, I don´t know his works before “El Valle de los Cocuyos”, which was published a few years later.

“Los Buscadores de Tesoros”

The works from Melendez appeared in Spain bringing a breath of fresh air and innovation in the fields of children and teenage illustration. Just like me, Melendez belongs to an era when the illustration work in Spain used to be extremely anonymous. There was no such thing as the Internet or illustrators blogs where we could talk about each others works. Anyhow, his wonderful work was not underestimated at all: in 1987 he got the National Illustration Award for his work “La Oveja Negra y Otras Fábulas” by Augusto Monterroso.

“El Verdadero Inventor del Buque Submarino”

The career of Melendez in the publishing world was so fast that he started getting his own illustration and text books just six years after he started in the business. For a country like Spain that’s something completely unbelievable. His first book of this kind was “El Verdadero Inventor del Buque Submarino” (Ediciones B, 1989). This is an unique work in which Melendez mixed graphic elements such as calligraphy and baroque engravings. During the forthcoming years, he got several awards, including the National Illustration Award for the second time. His last works called the attention from international publishers such as Harry N. Abrams from New York to get them published in the North-American market. But the colophon of his career was when Walt Disney/Touchstone Pictures bought the rights of his book “Leopold” for a movie project that still remains unveiled.

“Kifuko Yep-Yep Nami Gú”

From my point of view, one of the most interesting aspects in the work of Melendez is the impact that it provoked in the Spanish publishing world at the time. To understand this it’s neccessary to look back in time to the late 80’s, when most of the children’s illustration works followed a number of cannons and rules that were established before the 60’s. Some of these rules were already defied by artists like Ana Juan and Cessepe. The proposal of Francisco Melendez had nothing to do with the kind of childish drawing we were used to. They mostly looked like an innocent and provocative distillation of Greek art, baroque engravings and naive art. And all this was impregnated by an apparent love for the romantic British culture.

“Ocho Cuentos del Perrito y la Gatita”

In my humble opinion, the work by Melendez is based in the drawing while painting was put aside until his latest works. Melendez himself said in an interview: “I started drawing in black and white because I didn’t really control the colors. Later, they asked me to do it repeatedly so I kept doing so”. Melendez is foremost a master of simplicity, shapes, harmony in the composition of scenes, and character design. They are reasons enough to turn their works into true master works. On top of it, he could be the personified sample of the self-taught artist who has proven that originality and quality can happen despite the lack of “technical schooling”.

Another important highlight from his work is his ability to adapt his unique style to different aesthetics depending on the text requirements. This is an essential skill for every good illustrator. The Incan art in “El Valle de los Cocuyos”, the Japanese look in “Tomi Kikansha”, the baroque images in “The Nutcracker”, and the Victorian aesthetic in “Leopold” are some samples of this.

Since 1993 on, the figure of Francisco Melendez vanished. It was all rumours. The official promo biography from Espasa-Calpe publishings said: “He lives now in tranquility like a monk, concentrated in his work”. As rumor has it, after the loss of a person who was very close to him he decided to leave the illustration work to enter a monastery as a monk. I couldn’t say if this is true. It may be just a cloak of mystery that he used to leave the publishing business like a ghost in the fog, just like a character of one of his books.

“Leopold, La Conquista del Aire”

In relation with Francisco Melendez, I recall a conversation that I once had with Spanish child author Joan Manuel Gisbert, with whom I got an acquaintance in the late 80’s. At the moment, I was thinking seriously of becoming a professional illustrator and I told him about it. He portrayed a pretty black and discouraging picture to me saying that such thing was not possible to do in Spain. The I said there was some people already working earning a life with their illustration such as Francisco Melendez and he was actually doing pretty good. Gisbert answered: “That’s because Francisco Melendez is God!” I never really sorted out if Francisco Melendez is God or not, I don’t really give a damn about it because I’ve never believed in this type of idolization. But I do know that 20 years after this conversation nobody knows who the hell Francisco Melendez is.

Just like Spanish illustrator Gabi Beltrán said recently on his blog, illustrators are not rock stars. Much better this way. But what think is really sad is to see that the work of an artist like Francisco Melendez can pass from international recognition to complete obscurity in such a little span of years. That’s why Jacobo Muñiz and I are trying to put our little grain of sand in order to exhume Francisco’s work from forgetfulness. And we do this with the hope that other illustrators, young and old, discover the enormous richness of his artistic heritage so we can hold on tight to the tail of this bright comet in Spanish illustration called Francisco Melendez.

Here is an incomplete list of his books. If you have information about any other work please leave a comment so I can update it.

Spanish books:
-Once Animales con Garra y Uno con Alma de Ciro Alegría. Alfaguara, 1986.
-El Valle de los Cocuyos. Gloria Cecilia Díaz. Colección el Barco de Vapor. SM, 1986.
-Los Machafatos de Consuelo Armijo. Edelvives, 1987.
-El Cascanueces y el Rey de los Ratones. E.T.A. Hoffmann. Montena, 1987.
-Jacobo No Es Un Pobre Diablo. Gabriele Heiser. Colección el Barco de Vapor. SM, 1987.
-Los Buscadores de Tesoros. Edith Nesbit. Colección el Barco de Vapor. SM, 1987.
-La Huida. Antonio Martinez Menchén. Colección Austral Juvenil. Espasa-Calpe.1988.
-Los Cuentos de Mis Hijos. Horacio Quiroga. Alfaguara, 1988.
-Los Viajes de Gulliver. Jonathan Swift SM, 1988.
-Ocho Cuentos del Perrito y la Gatita. Josef Capek. Colección Austral Juvenil,. Espasa-Calpe.1989.
-El Gigante de la Selva. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-La Sortija Milagrosa. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-El Anillo de Simplicio. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-La Calabaza de la Suerte. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-La Hija del Minero. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-La Amazona de los Bosques. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-El Delfín de Oro. B. Monterde. Colección Cuentos del Pastor. Montena, 1989.
-El Verdadero Inventor del Buque Submarino. Francisco Melendez. B, 1989.
-Leopold, La Conquista del Aire. Francisco Melendez.. Aura Comunicación, 1990.
-El Peculiar Rally París-Pekin. Francisco Melendez. Aura Comunicación, 1991.
-El Viaje de Colomus. Francisco Melendez. Aura Comunicación, 1992.
-Kifuko Yep-Yep Nami Gú. Francisco Melendez. Ikusager, 1992.

English books:
-The Mermaid and the Major. Francisco Melendez. Harry N. Abrams, 1989.
-Leopold’s Dream. Robert Morton. Harry N. Abrams, 1993.

Francisco Melendez on the net:
-Tras la Estela de Francisco Melendez. A version of this same article in Spanish at the blog of Jacobo Muñiz, featuring different images than this one.
-Interview in Spanish. Peonza magazine, October 1993.

Have you ever wondered what cows dream about? This is the way I portrayed the nightmare of a stuffed cow. A scene that has to do with global warming and the terrible consequences of men’s abuse of nature. I know it may look weird at first sight but I will try to explain how all this developed.

I originally drew this illustration back in 1991, though I never really finished it. I recently recovered it from an old folder and decided it was time to get it finished and shown, so I completed the drawing and did a few corrections on the computer. The original pencil drawing is 35 x 32 cm.

The story of this piece stars in September 1989, during my first trip to United Kingdom. I was spending a few days in Brighton and my partner at the time and I decided to have a walk along the beach in the night. We were walking by the infamous Brighton Pier and we saw one of these machines with paws to catch stuffed animals. I never gamble or play these things, I think is a stupid way to waste your money. But this time, I saw the cutest stuffed animal ever amongst a mountain of bears. It was a little blue cow and she was looking at me with innocent eyes telling me: “Take me home”.

Detail of the Little Blue Cow

So I had to save her from jail and take her with me. I started spending one coin after the other and trying to grab her with these mechanical paws that never seem to catch a damn thing. After three tries, she was released! It was a very exciting moment. But it didn’t end so easily. Just after taking the Little Blue Cow out of the cage we found out there was also a brown bull, it was her boyfriend and she beg me to free him too. It broke my heart, so I couldn’t just go like that and we ended up spending 10 pounds on two little stuffed animals!

I liked so much the design of Little Blue Cow that I decided to do this illustration about her. After all it’s not the first time that a stuffed animal becomes protagonist of a story, let’s not forget that A. A. Milne wrote Winnie the Pooh stories after his son’s teddy bear. I wondered what this Little Blue Cow would dream of and I thought she would have nightmares about how men abuse nature. So I came up with this idea of the big cloud of smoke swallowing the sun.

Detail of the smoke

For the character of the smoke cloud, I got inspired by Goya’s painting “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons”. I saw this painting hanging on the wall at my godfather’s place when I was four and I got completely impressed by it. There’s an older version of this scene painted by Rubens in 1636 which supposedly inspired Goya for his.

The landscape was inspired by my family’s homeland, Orduña, in the Basque Country. I used a few sketches of the mountains that I had drawn there many years before. The house is a typical building from the area called “caserio”. My grandparents and ancestors used to live in a place like this. Cows, hills and “caserios” are some of the most popular elements in Basque culture. If you want to know more about it I suggest you to watch a Spanish movie directed by Julio Médem in 1992 called “Vacas” (Cows).

Detail of the “caserio”

When I look at this illustration it makes me think about for how long we’ve known about the terrible consequences of man’s abuse of the Earth. I remember talking about this subject with friends in the early 80’s after Peter Gabriel’s song “Here Comes the Flood” and it looked like science fiction but these catastrophes are happening today. I also wrote a song called “1000 Seasons Haiku” by 1996, along with my good friend Juan Carlos Samper, which talked about seeing images of earthquakes, floods, fires and droughts all over the world in the news. It is very sad to check how this is exactly what is going on today and stuffed blue cows must probably have the same kind of nightmares. I dream of the day their nightmares turn into beautiful dreams.

Please post this in your blog! Very important.

I read this on Imagisim Studios
IMPORTANT MATTER FOR ARTISTS - we must take action today! Do not lose ownership of your art!

Hi everyone,

The text below will be self-explanatory. There is an important issue facing us as artists, related to the copyrights of our works, which corporations wish to control and take at our expense, We must put a stop to this immediately unless you wish to see others owning and plagiarizing your art.

This is too important to ignore please participate and forward to your others.

http://www.sellyourtvconceptnow.com/orphan/orphan_works_information.mp3

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=609199
http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=121132
House version:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-5889

Senate version:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-2913
Congress is rushing these bills through to a floor vote. The House will start marking up their version of the bill at 2:00 today; the Senate will do so tomorrow. To try to stop this bill, we first need to slow down the race to get it passed.

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

Take Action: Don’t Let Congress Orphan Our Work

We’ve set up an online site for visual artists to e-mail their Senators and Representatives with one click.

This site is open to professional artists, photographers and any member of the image-making public.

We’ve provided sample letters from individuals representing different sectors of the visual arts.

If you’re opposed to the Orphan Works act, this site is yours to use.

For international artists and our colleagues overseas, we’ve provided a special link, with a sample letter and instructions as to whom to write.

2 minutes is all it takes to write Congress and protect your copyright:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/

For international people like myself, you can help by participating HERE

Please forward this message to every artist you know.

To finish the series of posts about the illustrations and design for this web site, today I’m going to talk about the characters in the header. As I said before, when I decided to do a web site for my illustration I wanted it to be as personal as possible. So there are lots of personal references to my life in this design and especially in the characters that show up in the header. I won’t unveil them in detail because I don’t want to bother you with the story of my life but for those who asked I will give a few hints.

The main figure of the three-woman is probably the first thing I ever had in mind when I did the first sketches for the design. I wanted to create the feeling of a wood, a magic garden and a long figure that would connect the bottom with the top part of the site. I imagined this figure as a representation of nature that connects the underground world with the sky, so I thought of this character who is half woman and half tree. This is not the first time I have worked with this type of figure, I have done similar characters in other illustrations and sculptures before.

From the aesthetic point of view, I found very interesting to use the same style of the black trees in the header illustration with the figure. She brings the primal energies from the underground and world and blows a wind full of lights where you can see different scenes from my past. Each ball of light represents a different stage of my life. Originally, I had six stages in mind, meaning six cycles of seven years each. For visual reasons I decided to simplify it because I didn’t want to get it too crowded, so you can see only four scenes which represent some important scenes from my life in relation with my illustration. Let’s see what we have in each.

On the first scene, you can see me when I was 10 dressing up like a clown, just like in this picture. As a kid, I was obsessed with circus and clowns and for a few years I just asked for the same circus toy for Christmas, year after year. The children figures may remind you of Mary Blair and it’s not a coincidence. Usually, my children figures don’t look like this, but this time I wanted to pay tribute to Mary Blair and her influence on the books that I read in my childhood. Before this design, I had also paid a similar tribute to her works with a header design for the header of a former blog that I used to have called “Generación Chiripitiflautica”.

The second scene represents the present time, featuring my wife Naomi and I, holding the light together as if we were still two kids. what you see here is a former version that I did and was not used.

This scene means a lot to me because is only because of Naomi’s initiative and constant support that I decided to work again in books and children illustration after some years of loss of self-confidence and retirement from painting. She helped me understand that I could make other people happy with my work and recover illusion for the work. So, for me, my illustration work is a project that we both hold together hand by hand.

In the next scene there is a green goblin holding the light. It represents my teenage years and the influence that a generation of British illustrators, such as Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Patrick Woodroffe and Roger Dean had in my life. I think I have already talked about this before in my Bio page and in an article about Brian Froud. Looking at their books I discovered that there was a new form of art further than comic books called “illustration”. It was not the same kind of illustration that I knew from children books from the 60’s, it was something really attractive and imaginative, fantastic, magical. It also it had a lot to do with the culture of the rock music I was into… and it was for adults! Then my whole scope of being a professional artist changed. If it was not for their fantastic works I don’t know what would have become of me…

In the last scene, there is a mysterious freak character sleeping. It was inspired by an ad from an old newspaper that I had recently found in Flickr. I love to look at old publicity and many of my ideas come from there. This figure also reminded me of the famous haired men who suffered from a disease called hypertrichosis, such as Stephan Bibrowsky -who was famously portrayed by Diane Arbus- and Petrus Gonzales -nicknamed “Wolf Boy”-. So this character represents myself during the 90’s. Not only because my hair was really long at the time, but because I feel like during those years the illustrator side of me went through a long state of hibernation. Although I think I have been a pretty active person who has always been involved in different creative projects, I have the feeling that for those years a part of myself was merged in a profound sleep.

If you have any questions about the rest of the header I’ll be glad to answer but hope not to get all the mysteries unveiled…

This is probably the first illustration I ever did for “Words and Vision”: the book I am working on that will compile a collection of illustrations inspired by songs from different renowned musicians and lyricists. When I did this illustration, back in 1990, the project wasn’t in existence yet. I just did it because I felt like it, but in a way it would become the beginning of this project because I liked the experience of portraying the way I sense some of my favorite songs and I kept doing more work of this kind.

“The Song of the Seagoat” is based on a poem/song by Pete Sinfield, which was originally released in his solo album from 1973 “Still”. I love both the music and the poem. Pete Sinfield’s lyrics and poems had been one of my biggest influences in my life and art, including his work with King Crimson as well as other lyrics for progressive rock bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Premiata Forneria Marconi. He has ben credited as one of the finest rock lyricist and poets in the history of rock music and his solo album “Still” is in my list of top favorite albums.

During the late 80’s, I used to carry a bag with me everywhere I would go and inside there was a copy of the Spanish edition of his 1979 book “Under The Sky” my good friend Alicia Ramos gave me as a gift and I still bless her for it. So, every time I would sit in a park or at my friends place I would sit and read some Pete Sinfield’s poems from this little book. The book actually got so wasted from carrying it all around and I ended up getting it re-binded. You can see a picture of my “refurnished” book, and a page with one of the beautiful illustrations by Julia Fryer, who also did the sleeve art for Premiata Forneria Marconi’s album “Photos of Ghosts”.

So the visionary poetry of Pete Sinfield was a big influence on my work and still is. I can’t tell why I decided to use this particular poem, but I can remember that when I did it I was researching a lot about micro-organisms and lighting forms of life. I thought it would be wonderful to mix this micro-universe with the world of stellar bodies in a scenery that could be located in the sky and the underwater world at the same time. When I do these kind of illustrations based on music and lyrics I don’t try to reproduce all the words say but to capture the general feeling. For this particular piece, I used some images from the poem, such as “aquarium runes” and the “L-shaped goat” figure. But I also got inspired a lot by the music, which was based on Vivaldís’s “Concerto in D” and I pictured the goat directing the concerto in the middle of this dreamy world.

For me, the most important was to capture the overall atmosphere and especially the character of the Sea Goat, who is aware of something about a reality that the human mortals don’t. So, I portrayed this kind and sad figure that still remains me of the mother Earth suffering from men’s lack of consciousness. I did this illustration as a mix of techniques, including pencil drawing, aircraft, and acrylics. I can’t tell why I decided to do it in black and white but I’m pretty sure that it has to do a lot with the feeling that I got from the colors of the music itself.

If you like this illustration I invite you to listen to Pete Sinfield’s album “Still” and seat to enjoy the lyrics and spend a few minutes in the world of the Sea Goat “to touch the earth and to see the birth, the smile, the style down an unspun mile of life.”

Detail of “The song of the sea Goat”

The Song of the Sea Goat

The sea goat casts Aquarian runes through beads of mirrored tears,
Suave pirates words of apricot crawl out of your veneer
Anoint your eyes with Midas’ oil and make it still appear
Alladin’s lamp is glowing bright transmuting panacea;
To fill your souls with sugared holes.
“Oh can’t you hear” sang the sea goat “the nonsense makes me numb.”
“It’s near it’s clear” sang the sea goat “we live to overcome,
The madman’s voice and his nowhere choice,
The pain that drains like an endless day of rain.”

The sea goat reads the flight of birds and writes upon the sand;
Gold waterfalls of autumn wheat slip through a pointing hand
Whose fingers stiff with sentences still beckon to the band
To play the “Best Foot Forward March” and deafen all the land.
With hollow words, it’s so absurd!
“Take your stand” sang the sea goat “the night goes on and on.”
“Unwrap your plans” sang the sea goat “tell everyone you’ve gone
To touch the earth and to see the birth
The smile, the style down an unspun mile of life.”

It fills the air! It fills the air!
The song of the sea goat shaking in the domes
The song of the sea goat as endlessly he roams,
Between the sunset’s crimson veil
On smooth grey streets where the drunkard spins his tale.

The sea goat sips and hurls his glass along the smoke-filled road
Where shuttered snakes of brakeless trains run aching with their load
Of spring-eyed, tonguetied, wooldyed lads who kiss the L-shaped goat
Which soon will smear their uniforms with blood, whitewash & woad.
Damn iron minded, gold braid blinded, officers and gentlemen!
“God!” sang the sea goat “is always on both sides.”
“Change” sang the sea goat “is constant as the tides
“And this play” sang the sea goat “is strangely synthesised
When your part of a cast where the first comes last
Where the east goes west and the sun is burning out

And your part of a cast where the first comes last
Where the east goes west and the sun is burning out”

Lyrics © copyright Pete Sinfield 1973.