Mila Yaneva-Tabakova - The First Five Years

“It's safe at home. It wasn’t so scary before outside, either... Then you showed up.” Mila Yaneva leads us to the edge of the pool, where she begins a story of the dramatic contrasts of motherhood. Experienced, sincere, revealing. Her authored picture book has so little text that it borders on the silent book genre. But the text is thoughtful and precisely dosed to interact with the dominant visual narrative. The storytelling talent of Mila Yaneva is indisputable. Her ability to use metaphors, to shrink and stretch the action before the reader’s eyes in all sorts of metamorphoses, is also remarkable: the mother’s hand stretches through several streets to reach the child’s bed; the bathtub turns into a high-water river, the river into an ocean in which predatory sharks lurk. And the stripes on the sofa heat up and blaze... Until the “flood” of tears puts them out. The expressive juicy tempera brushstrokes, the colours combined in reduced ranges with a strong symbolic impact, the dense paintings – everything she does as an illustrator is subordinate to the meaning.