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Like everyone who decides to start a carrier, profession or a job, the cartoonist also has to follow a mentor in order to find its own style. It's logical that the Argentinean cartoonists whom I saw and studied since I was a kid played this role. The list was really large, but my most admired were always Lino Palacio and Divito. What I like the most from Lino Palacio, drawer, is the neatness of the lines, the elegance to position the figures and the harmony in the characters proportions. His stories with no text and the use of time between one illustration and another, and above other Argentinean cartoonists, his use of a larger and universal subject matters. From Divito, I didn't only receive the "long distance influence" watching his drawings in the magazines that arrived at home, but also, and once I met him, true personal drawing lessons. When I was working at "Rico Tipo" I used to take him my pencil drawings, he used to correct them and say "this is better this way, here you have an unnecessary tree or cloud, etc", then I made a clean copy in ink and just then, if he thought they were fine, he published them for me. What I learned from him, was a professional behavior, never copy ideas or shameless, others styles, and most of all the respect that has to be given to the reader. After a while Oski appeared, he is the great Mentor not only of drawing but also of life. This is curious, because if someone sees an Oski drawing and one of mine, they will never find the influence, nevertheless it's big, and it is in the most important that is not seen: Oski taught me, above all, to watch and try to extract the essence from what you are looking at, such as a cathedral, a woman, a cat or a carrot, but this goes with a discipline: to research before start drawing. He also knew how to instil a work morality including the respect for the profession, for the reader and to oneself. Also to work in each drawing, for insignificant that could be, as if it was to decorate the Sistine Chapel and therefore, the obsession to research about each subject about to be drawn. Very original, Luis J. Medrano was another mentor for me. Creator of the "graphogramme", mixture of "traditional jokes" and comics, always (except in a few exceptions) in a unique illustration. I learned from him the significance of general culture in the vocational training of a caricaturist. Later, with 18, I held an issue of the French weekly " Paris-Match ". There I met two caricaturists that marked my life forever: Bosc and Chaval. Their influence was notorious not only in me, but in a lot of young caricaturists generations, that is why maybe this days people can not appreciate the big change they introduced. Meeting Bosc and Chaval was for me the revelation of the kind of humour I was interested in, synthetic, no text, direct, with a huge doses of surrealism but, and above all, completely away of local costumes humour with what we were so harpooned. The novelty of absurd was coming (scooters that crashed against elephants, passenger in planes that watched a Tran via in the middle of a flight, a piano crashing against an automobile that was coming on the opposite side), all of this, mixed with a stabbing critic to the militarism, power, obscurantism and a profound social sensibility. In the other hand, the admirable assurance of Ronald Searle lines, English drawer, rooted in France; couldn't influence in me not because of my incapacity but because what I learned from him was how to create atmospheres, scenarios, expressions and characters position and a certain precious style that It always resulted very attractive to me. Years later I discovered that actually they and other big caricaturists as André Francois came from the "Big Father", the rumen Saúl Steinberg, the biggest graphic humorist given by the XXth century. Steinberg has always had and still has a big influence in a lot of generations in the whole world, with a level that any of us could reach. The fresher of his drawings and the sensibility of his lines put him in the frontier between the humour drawing and the art with majuscules. At last, other of my biggest mentors was, Sempé, born French in august of 1932 (I was born in July 1932) whom I consider, with me, one of the last exponents of a kind of humour almost extinguished, the humanist humour, not contaminated by the satire of politics of the moment. As one of mines, his drawings doesn't t produce the instant laughing, instead they have to be looked with attention, even thought. Let's say that I consider him my brother, not a birth brother because I spend a little time with him, but an "ink brother". |
