THE GAME

The Game

The time of delusions has an unlimited duration. In this cosmos, the principle of ethics and aesthetics moves away and leaves a huge space for copies of what is seen. Thus oblivion remains a memory. In contrast, it expands a completely fresh, luxurious, true and original cosmos of playfulness. The cosmos of Vanda Čižmek.

Written work for children and young adults (regularly for adults too) cries out for artistic design, for quality graphic style, and thus for illustration. In each of these artistic relationships, Vanda is a creative volcano without hesitation. The astonishing skill visible in her drawing style accurately evokes the motifs of new worlds that have emerged from the pens of many writers. The linear motifs on Vanda’s drawing table take on added meaning by expanding the horizons of the given story. To the girl who walks through the fairytale forest, Vanda adds happy thoughts and the occasional lost creature, to the boy in dreams a tuft of joy, to the houses in a row the added value of past times. These peculiarities are not just the author’s moments of artistic lucidity, but an intellectual and emotional concern for the excellent communication that the reader forever accepts and with its help revives the suppressed spaces of his personal imagination.

The added values that Vanda weaves in with her original artistic interventions are reflected primarily in the thoughtful composition of the illustrations, and immediately afterwards in the graphics, details that intelligently confronted create parallel, meaningful stories. Her graphic art is not a conflict between black and white, but their complete harmony, and certainly a valuable design solution. In this black-and-white harmony, Vanda introduces the original structure in the best possible way, enriching and reviving graphic art to the extreme. Color is here a factor that in all its power justifies the idea of emotion. Unobtrusive, and complete in its splendor, it offers the atmosphere of a forest, city, village, weather conditions, play …

In the illustrations (drawings!) of this excellent illustrator, not a single line takes up the space of a white background by mistake, not a single line is ‘extra’. Surfaces create a relationship of plans and clearly suggest the environment. In such an environment, the heroes of the story, even random characters, are always shaped in a completely new, yet characteristic way for the author. Their states and emotions are not pathetic expressions but true in their human measure. With such skilful characterization, the occasional atropomorphization of the environment without emphasizing the superfluous, builds a new harmony of Vanda’s artistic representations.

With its unique and highly valuable artistic standards, the completely new world of Vanda Čižmek opens new spaces for imagination and art, as well as for written expression. Complete harmony of ethics and aesthetics.

Davor Schunk