Unmistakable strokes | Madrid | THE COUNTRY

Banners, buses and canopies have been support of his drawings. Also cardboard briks or socks. José A. Roda never imagined that orders would come like this. “For a while now, I feel much more comfortable when I have to solve something that others ask me to do,” he explains. He arrived in Madrid seven years ago and feels privileged to be able to live off his unmistakable lines. “The way I draw is the way I see things, or at least the way I want to see them.” Now she shares free drawings so that boys and girls can color, in tribute to those who work piecework these days. “It’s my way of thanking you for what you do.”

Free download. A scientist, a doctor, a stockist, a teacher and a messenger are some of the protagonists of The New Super Heroes. On the artist’s website, joseantonioroda.com, are the drawings, free to download. “For me it is important to contribute in some way to the collective. I have worked with children for many years and I feel very close to them. At the beginning of the confinement, it seemed to me that for them to understand what was happening there was no better way than through play and creativity. ” You have been excited by the response to your proposal. “They have sent me many photographs of children coloring the drawings. I know they have been used in various schools as plastic homework. ”

At home. Every day he gets up around 6 in the morning. “I am methodical, routine and obsessive. It was before and I still am now. I get up early like I’m not confined. ” Very early he gets to work. “Now I do it at the only table I have at home, in the living room. I am used to doing many things in the same space. I think it is a common evil in a big city for people with small pockets ”. José A. Roda is looking forward to returning to the studio he shares near Puerta de Toledo. “I have been there for just over two years. I alternate it with libraries, study classrooms… ”. Before the closure, he used to change jobs frequently, even on the same day. “There are great places, like the fifth floor of Centro Centro, in Cibeles. It has very nice tables to work with, good views, plugs and lots of light ”.

Go for a walk. What the illustrator has brought worse from confinement has been not being able to go for a walk. From today you will be able to do it, within this phase of the de-escalation. “I’m dying to walk. I have never been out of friends or gangs, I have always been somewhat lonely so I have walked a lot, since I was a teenager ”. When he has time, he escapes to Paseo de las Delicias and Madrid Río, his favorite places to walk. Ideas come to him in his tours. “Walking I can think of everything. Anything I write in the notebook of the mobile or I leave myself an audio note ”. Whenever he can he goes from one place to another on foot. “It helps me have depth of field in my eyes and also inside my head.” Walking helps you be better. “I am a very nervous person and I need it and I enjoy it.”

Madrid dream. Two years ago they called him from the Madrid City Council to commission the image of Mira Madrid, the campaign that focused on little-known places in the capital. “It was an incredible project. I remember the entire Gran Vía with my banners, screens in Callao… I spent two weeks chasing buses with the signs to take photos and videos of them ”. Is Madrid a source of inspiration for José A. Roda? “More than a formal inspiration, it is an imaginary setting for me, as something aspirational, a conquest that does not end. More than the city inspires me the people I admire and who have come to this city to seek life long before me. It is the Madrid of Spanish cinema films that I saw as a teenager and that made me come here to fight for what I want. ”

Non-stop. Born in Cornellà de Llobregat in 1987, for three years he has dedicated himself exclusively to his own. “At first he did not live, he survived. Fortunately I have the feeling that little by little I am having everything better armed and that I am working more and better each time. ” In recent months he has received commissions such as the poster for Library Day. “Not every day they call you on the phone from the Ministry of Culture. I was very excited, “he admits. Simple lines and primary colors, very vivid, which he captures by hand and digitally the same on a poster as on a cardboard brik, as he did for Cabify. He would love to receive more such orders, so unexpected. Through its website it sells risographies and serigraphs, signed and numbered, and even socks, which it made in collaboration with PeSeta. On his Instagram He shares bullets, in which he ironic about being autonomous, the haters who inhabit social networks and other issues of modern life. “I enjoy a lot”.