Vyara Boyadjieva - My Sofia and Other Images

“You go, you come back” is the first sentence in this graphic novel dedicated to the city of Sofia. In it, the artist goes back through her childhood memories of trips with her grandfather to the last stops of the public transport just “for pleasure.” Sofia has many different faces, and years later, Vyara Boyadzhieva experiences them with the eyes of an artist. These 20 favourite urban locations are stages for her characters. Busy passers-by and people reading, young families and children playing, as well as dogs, cats, and pigeons as full-fledged inhabitants of this common space. Even the people in the illustrated advertisements are caught in a moment of action. The illustrator is exceptionally observant of small gestures, gaits, and states, and the deformation of the bodies adds expressiveness without crossing the line into the grotesque. The spontaneous capturing of all these things is seen well in her renderings with linear sketches and written overheard phrases. This is not a homogeneous literary work – the entire book has a sketch-like quality – but it is very beautiful in this form and gets you to look at it for a long time. The exact choice of the technique with which these urban paintings are created alla prima, the restrained tonalities, and the delicate nuances in the details express the different hours of the day, the change of seasons, but above all – the city living with its inhabitants, her city, her Sofia.