La recherche, Lancet may

 
  I compared the researchers' work (and also the life in general) to the adventure of some climbers.

And this is the illustration:

 (like a wink I put the title in french in homage to Proust)

Lancet, special Alzheimer

  Elena Bécker, the editor of the magazine, asked me to do the cover for an extra copy, dedicated to the priorities in research on Alzheimer's and other dementias.

["We have commissioned to a group of about 30 experts to establish a path of the priorities in Europe in the short or medium term ranging from public health actions to prevent dementia to some recommendations to improve the early diagnosis or to discover new treatments. We will present this issue at an event at the European Parliament in march"].

  I painted a cylinder in which a woman clings to the inside walls while it is rolling down a slope. She's sitting on a dresser whose drawers have been opened by the movement and the gravity and they shed their content wich is going to get lost.

  The dresser symbolizes the memory; in its "drawers" we save the personal things represented here as a small white pieces of fabric.

  I took the metaphor of a small piece of forniture to symbolize the memory, the intimate, from the sculpture by Raquel Cortés I have in my home. It's an abstract portrait of her sister Maria.

Raquel Cortés and "Maria".

  This is the cover illustration:

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR (Lancet april)

  When I finished reading the book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat", my head was buzzing with the reflections that Oliver Sacks makes about the case of the brothers who calculated dates and who played with difficult prime numbers. He says that the social services decided to separate them for their integration and that, according to him, the separation cut the "magic" of their relationship and turned them into citizens who never reached a life like those of the average level of the people, although they achieved some autonomy.

  He put examples in which the society could better integrate some people if didn't use so little subtle pattern of classification.

  These days I've talked to people who work in fields like this and I see that they have a similar opinion, they take much care of the language they use to refer to them, etc. 

  All that suggested to me that love is what must weigh more also in these things.

  I tried to say it in a way that was non trivial but with much exploited elements (the kiss, the cupids, the pink color).

 Cupid in a tatoo from internet; its author is not said

  It's true that the head with the plaster has a disturbing air, but I can't avoid that, despite the reflexions, the brain diseases desconcert me. 

  Some of my friends coudn't see the kiss and that's why I put here an image for help:

Lancet march

  The presentation program of an exhibition I saw in Madrid in 2006 entitled "Inner worlds revealed", organized by the Obra Social of La Caixa, so it began:

  "Since the mid-twentieth century, words as art brut and outsider art have encouraged a problematic distinction between art performed by professional and renowned artists and art made by people who live "in the margins of society", often mentally ill, criminals, self-taught visionaries and mediums, among other individuals allegedly eccentric (...)"

                      "General view of the island Neveranger", 1911, pencil and crayon on newsprint; Kunstmuseum Bern.

  Adolf Wölfli was on of the artists included in the exhibition. I copy it from Wikipedia:

  Wölfli had a turbulent childhood. He was sexually abused and he was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of orphanages. He later worked as an agricultural laborer and briefly joined the army. He was later convicted of attempted child molestation, for which he served prison time. After being freed, he was re-arrested for a similar offense, which led him to be admitted in the Waldau psychiatric hospital in Bern, were he spent the rest of his adult life. He suffered from psychosis and hallucinations and his behaviour was initially described as violent and agitated, leadind to him being kept in isolation for a time at hospital.

At some point after his admission, Wölfli began to draw. Unfortunatly his first drawings have not survived, resulting therefore difficult to determinate the exact moment when he began his work. His first surviving works (a series of 50 pencil drawings) are dated from between 1904 and 1906.

Walter Morgenthaler, a doctor at the Waldau Clinic, took a particular interest in Wölfli's art, later publishing Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A psychiatric patient as artist) in 1921 which first brought Wölfli to the attention of the art world.

Morgenthaler's book was revolutionary in some ways, by arguing that a person with a severe mental illeness could be a serio artist and therefore contribute to the development of art.

Wölfli produced a huge number of works during his life, often working with the barest of materials and trading smaller works with visitors to the clinic to obtain pencils and paper.

The images Wölfli produced were complex, intricate and intense. They worked to the very edges of the page with detailed borders. As a manifestation of his "horror vacui", every empty space was filled with two small holes. Wölfli called the shapes around these holes his birds.

His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical dimension. This dimension was developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.

In 1908, he launced into writing a semi-autobiographical work which at the end had a total of over 25.000 pages and 1.600 illustrations collected in 45 volumes. This work was a mix of elements of his own life blended with fantastical stories of his adventures from which he transformed himself from a child to "Knight Adolf" to "Emperor Adolf" and finally to "St Adolf II".

Wölfli died at Waldau in 1930. Later was formed a foundation to preserve his art and his works were taken to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, where are now on display.

Wölfli's work has inspired many composers. Perhaps the most notable is the Danish Per Nørgård, who after viewing an exhibition of Wölfli radically changed his style, by arriving to compose an opera inspired by this artist's life entitled "The Divine Circus".

 

The picture from where I started

  Before knowing all this information, I took, a bit by chance, a work of Wölfli which appeared reproduced very small in the program and I used it - tranformed - as if another artist had used it to draw the tiles of a fountain.

  In ceramics many parts of the paintings result in two files of repeated phrases. I thought the division into squares could represent the analytical process.

  I wanted my drawing to express how the work of a "special" person (the reflex of a part of his mind), through a chain of individuals who interpret and analyse it, ends to form part of a fountain that is an image which is associated to the enrichment.

 

 



 



Lancet Neurology february

  The image of the february  magazine cover associates  the brain with the sky:

The covers of Lancet Neurology: January

  I'm doing drawings for the cover of the magazine in 2016.

  In the cover of January you can see a sea-brain where a group of figures, by collaborating, are trying to bring towards themselves a raft with some people that seem to be disoriented, isolated or concentrated on themselves.

  On the raft there are fewer people to accentuate the idea of the vulnerability and the loneliness they may feel because they represent the sick.

  Those of the group symbolize the researchers, they work as a team, it's not well understood whether from another raft or from a kind of pier on the mainland.

 

The Lancet in Copenhagen.

The fresco of the attic finished

  It was missing that I included some pictures of the result; here they are: