Anna Llenas, creator of ‘The Color Monster’: “I make books for adults that children can read” | Culture | EUROtoday

Anna Llenas shouldn’t be yellow. But it’s not essential for her to vary shade, like her well-known character, to intuit the emotion that predominates in her nowadays. There are loads of causes, in any case, for pleasure. Participates within the Bologna kids’s and youth guide honest, essentially the most related within the sector, as a star visitor. And his triumph is summed up in figures that produce one other feeling that his guide touches on: concern. The shade monster which he wrote and drew in 2012, has bought six million copies world wide, between the unique and the remainder of the gathering. For greater than a decade, she has been selling readings and talks about how kids really feel in 40 totally different languages, which the creator identifies as actual success. Although his work has additionally generated anger: he has been accused of oversimplifying or stretching the gum. She responds the identical as her albums: she approaches even criticism calmly, just like the monster when it lies within the hammock. So the one emotion absent, in 45 minutes of speak in Bologna to overview his profession, is unhappiness.

“There is always a mixture of feelings, but today I am happy,” smiles Llenas (Barcelona, ​​48 years previous). This similar week The shade monster has returned to prime 10 of best-selling kids’s books in Italy, the place Gribaudo publishes it. And his Spanish label, Flamboyant, guarantees new releases within the coming months, with dolls included. In London, in the meantime, an immersive exhibition devoted to the guide continues till May. The Catalan has printed extra works: Empty, Mom, I like you (nearly at all times) o Topito Earthquake. She has typically mentioned that she doesn’t need to be “Anna of the Monster”: “I don’t want to get attached to a certain idea of ​​success, because it is not an identity, I don’t want to see myself like that.” At the identical time, she says that she and her two kids often describe the character as “one of the family.” And he’s conscious that it’s a international phenomenon in properties and colleges throughout half the planet.

From China got here the gratitude of a father who nonetheless remembers: he returned from work so late that the one second he shared together with his son consisted of studying to him each night time. The shade monster earlier than he went to mattress. And in one other distant nook of the globe the work started to take form. Because Llenas studied promoting and labored on it for years. “I didn’t like it, I drew since I was little, I remember my father taking me to the Picasso Museum. I would have wanted to choose art or psychology,” she says. However, he acquired carried away with the guess in principle with extra exits. He realized so rapidly that it was not his factor that he studied graphic design in parallel. But she continued to turn into an artwork director. Today he thinks it may have been good for him: “Maybe it gave me an idea of ​​the market, of how to present things.” Even higher was that she was fired, simply on the similar time that she was kicked out of her house: “It was one of the happiest days of my life. My driving force was art and psychology. I felt like I was a fish out of water, I had a deeper need to say something that I couldn’t in that medium and environment. I had a little money and time. And I thought about what I wanted.” The reply was a four-month journey to Latin America.

She says that one thing “sensory, an inner voice” in a sure method led her to the Southern Cone. “Sometimes you need to go to the other side of the world to find yourself more,” he provides. Finally, in Buenos Aires, he additionally reunited with the brushes. Since she was a baby, Llenas minimize, pasted, coloured and beloved collages. In his grandmother’s clothes retailer he had discovered an oasis for his first creations. “But when I returned to it I painted differently, the inner world, what was happening inside me, something new,” he remembers. The path introduced her again to Barcelona, ​​in direction of a postgraduate diploma in illustration. And, lastly, to his major passions: artwork and feelings. After some time, he returned to a personality he had drawn for a bathe curtain. And he recovered previous childhood clippings from newspapers and magazines from his grandmother’s infinite reserves. In 2012, with all this, he placed on the web page a wierd, colourful creature. The first sentence learn: “This is the color monster.” His life was altering once more. Forever.

“I am motivated to make things visible that are not visible, to give them shape. I think that all my books, from the first to the last, are different ways of getting to the same place. I am interested in the intangible world, in the end they are the things that move us and determine life,” displays the creator. And how do you handle the accountability of coping with deep subjects for early readers? “The trick was not to think about it. I started from an impulse of mine. I learned as an adult to name things, understand them, manage them. And that’s what I wanted to convey. In fact, I don’t think it was just childish. The market puts you there. But I would say that I make books for adults that children can also read.” Of course, it has gained help at totally different ages: The shade monster He has turn into a good friend of the little ones, an ally of many academics – additionally with the creation of free faculty provides – and a tenant of some properties. And, for his mom, the character has introduced fame, recognition and extra skilled stability.

Although she insists: “Money and success are not everything. I don’t focus much of my attention there. Relationships or an illness have much more importance in life. What gives meaning to this is whoever receives it and says ‘it has helped me too’. I felt that the book not only explains emotions, but that it can be a vehicle to communicate and discuss them at home, because they are super difficult. You can feel them from your prism, it can affect you a lot, and I don’t see their importance. And if you don’t, We speak, with respect, we cannot understand each other. And laying the cards to make it possible I think it is good.” First, he did the original work, 14 years ago. But then came its colorable version, in mandalas, pop-up or komishibai (card theater), the monster doctor or “at school”. And with them the insinuations that, beyond the color, it was transforming into another creature: a goose that laid golden eggs. “I do not agree. From the primary to the third, 10 years have handed. I believe I’ve restricted myself with respect to what may have been exploited: I may have achieved far more and I made a decision to not. To care for the character. And additionally as a result of time is cash and I would not wish to restrict myself to not proceed creating additional,” replies Llenas.

His work has also received another recurring attack: reducing too much, even trivializing the weight of emotions. And the author has studies in art psychotherapy, another field in which she works. Another children’s book even backfired, Blue is not sad, red is not angry, whose allusion, without being explicit, was evident. “That’s a simplification. In any case, in the event that they converse badly of you, it is since you’re recognized. And when one thing turns into crucial, it appears wholesome to me that there shouldn’t be a single voice, however fairly that there needs to be criticism. The guide tells a narrative. And a narrative is a discount. Just as a result of the monster acquires a sure shade with an emotion does not imply that unhappiness is blue, proper? Even so, I agree with the essence, as a result of when a symbolic language is so large that it turns into a unilateral reality, that is dangerous.” Llenas gives as examples that the rainbow already represents the LGTBI flag, and white is associated with a wedding, but they can also have other meanings. “My instinct was by no means to say that emotions are like arithmetic. If somebody criticizes me for that, they do not know me,” he adds.

Half the world does know its most well-known creature. But Llenas says that now he want to make an illustrated work for adults. And he provides: “I put a lot of interest not only in launching a project, but in taking care of it.” The monster is aware of it properly. The certainly one of joys that you’ve got defined. And what has given.