Idol Award Laureate 2013 1
Isol from Argentina is an illustrator, cartoonist
, painter, graphic artist, poet, singer and composer. Born Marisol Misenta in 1972, she grew up in an academic family in Buenos Aires, where she still lives with her husband and one-year-old son. Growing up, she says, she was always surrounded by the best books and the artistic, avant-garde Argentinian comic books of the time. As a child she was constantly reading and writing, while her brother Federico devoted himself to music. Isol began her artistic education at the Escuela Nacional de Belles Artes, “Rogelio Yrurtia”, studying to be an art teacher, followed by a couple of years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. She gradually started introducing textual components to her paintings – epigraphs, inscriptions or mottoes, as she calls them. Her interest in telling stories through pictures stood her in good stead when she started working as a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator, a job that requires the ability to capture an event in a single image. For Isol, the image is part of the narrative, not mere decoration. In 1996, Isol entered the manuscript of her first picturebook, Vida de perros, in a competition in Mexico. One of the jury members replied by fax, saying that unfortunately she could not be a winner because her images were too “eccentric”. However, the jury member in question was Daniel Goldin, the publisher at Fondo de Cultura Económica, a major publishing house. He had fallen in love with the book and promised Isol he would publish it if she would modify her images a little. “The eyes were too psychotic, for sure, and they asked me to tone down the smiles,” she later explained. Isol changed nothing, but instead wrote a five-page theoretical justification. The book received an honourable mention in the competition and was published largely unchanged. In this debut work we can already recognize many of the expressive techniques that she would go on to develop and use again in later works. Vida de perros, about a small boy’s relationship with his dog, was the beginning of a long-term working relationship with the publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica. As a result, most of Isol’s books have been published in Mexico. Following her debut, she published several more picturebooks in fairly quick succession, employing the same expressive style: Regalo sorpresa, Cosas que pasan (1998) and Intercambio cultural (2000). As a visual storyteller, Isol sees things from the eye level of a child. She is unfailingly loyal to her young readers. A straight, consistent line of energy and trust runs through all her works. This energy is occasionally explosive, always expressive, never latent. Isol trusts in children’s ability to meet her in the story. As an artist, she moves freely across the bounda