A few days ago, The Grandma visited the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona. She went there to contemplate once again the extraordinary world created by Lluís Domènech i Montaner and returned home with several books. One of them was a small volume entitled Petita Història. Domènech i Montaner, published by Editorial Mediterrània. It was supposed to take The Grandma into the world of Domènech i Montaner. Instead, it also took her back to her childhood. Because the illustrations were by Pilarín Bayés. And there are names that belong not only to cultural history but also to our personal history. For The Grandma, Pilarín Bayés is one of them.
Her drawings were part of a childhood in Catalunya when finding books, magazines and cultural products for children in Catalan could not always be taken for granted. There was also Cavall Fort. Books illustrated by Pilarín. Stories. Comics. Characters. Colours. Words written in Catalan.
Today, surrounded by an enormous variety of books, television channels, websites, games and digital content, it may be difficult to understand how important those things could be. But they were important. Very important. They offered children something apparently simple and profoundly significant: the possibility of discovering the world in their own language.
Pilarín Bayés was born in Vic in 1941 and studied Fine Arts in Barcelona. Over an extraordinarily long career, she has illustrated hundreds of books and worked with some of the most important initiatives devoted to children's culture in Catalunya. Her style is immediately recognisable. Crowded scenes. Tiny characters. Movement everywhere. Humour. Colour. People talking, running, working, celebrating, arguing, playing. And details. Always details. You cannot simply look at a Pilarín Bayés illustration. You have to explore it. Your eyes wander around it and inevitably discover another little character, another gesture, another animal, another joke, another story happening somewhere in the corner.
Perhaps this explains part of her extraordinary connection with children. Because children are magnificent observers. Give an adult an illustration and they may look at its principal subject. Give the same illustration to a child and the child may notice the tiny dog hiding behind a chair. Pilarín understood that. Her pictures reward curiosity. Before we can read, we can look We sometimes make the mistake of considering illustration secondary to literature. There is the writer, we think, and then somebody adds the pictures. But anyone who remembers a beloved childhood book knows that this is not true. Sometimes we forget the sentences. We rarely forget the pictures.
Before children become confident readers, images already allow them to enter stories. An illustrator can show fear without writing the word fear. An illustrator can explain friendship without defining it. An illustrator can make a historical period understandable through clothes, houses, streets and faces. An illustrator can make a child curious about a person who died a hundred years ago. And that is exactly what happens in Petita Història. Domènech i Montaner.
Domènech i Montaner becomes approachable. Architecture becomes a story. History becomes populated by people. A great architect steps down from his monument and enters the imagination of a child. That is not merely decoration. That is storytelling.
And there is something else The Grandma deeply admires about children's illustrators. Their audience is ruthless. Children have very little interest in cultural diplomacy. An adult may politely say: "How interesting." A child is perfectly capable of saying: "I don't like it." And closing the book. No elaborate review. No sophisticated explanation. No concern about offending the artist. Just: boring. That brutal sincerity makes children one of the most demanding audiences an artist can have.
A children's illustrator must attract attention without overwhelming it, communicate without patronising, simplify without becoming simplistic and entertain without underestimating the intelligence of the reader. That is extraordinarily difficult. Children may have less knowledge than adults. They certainly do not have less imagination.
And perhaps this is why children's illustrators deserve much more recognition than we sometimes give them. They do something extraordinary. They help construct our first visual memory. Think about the books you loved as a child. You may not remember who published them. You may have forgotten parts of the story. Perhaps you cannot even remember the exact title. But suddenly, decades later, you see an illustration. And something happens. You recognise a line. A face. A way of drawing trees. A particular combination of colours. And you are seven years old again. Few artists possess that kind of power.
For several generations of Catalan children, this visual memory cannot be separated from another extraordinary cultural institution: Cavall Fort.
Founded in 1961, during Franco's dictatorship, the magazine created a space where children could read stories, comics and articles in Catalan at a time when the public presence of the language had been severely restricted. Its importance therefore went far beyond entertainment. It helped make Catalan something completely natural in the everyday cultural life of a child. You did not need a lesson explaining why your language mattered. You simply opened a magazine. And there it was. That may be one of the most powerful forms of cultural transmission. Not telling a child: “You must preserve this language.” But telling them a wonderful story in that language.
Pilarín Bayés belonged to that cultural universe. And people like her helped ensure that Catalan children could see their language, their history, their towns, their traditions and themselves inside books.
There is something unexpectedly appropriate about finding Pilarín Bayés illustrating Lluís Domènech i Montaner. Domènech believed that architecture could bring together many arts. Stonecutters, sculptors, ceramicists, mosaicists, glassmakers, metalworkers and painters participated in creating buildings in which art was not merely added afterwards. It was part of the whole. Perhaps children's books teach us something similar. The writer gives us words. The illustrator gives those words another life. Neither language replaces the other. They meet on the page. And suddenly a child can enter the story.
So this post begins with Pilarín Bayés. But it cannot end with her. It belongs to every illustrator who has ever sat before an empty page wondering how to draw something that will make a child stop and look. To those who draw dragons. To those who draw planets. To those who draw grandmothers, pirates, monsters, footballers, witches, scientists and talking animals. To those who illustrate history. To those who create worlds that have never existed. To those whose names children may never remember but whose pictures they will remember for the rest of their lives. Their work deserves respect. Because illustrating for children does not mean making lesser art for smaller people. Quite the opposite. It means creating art for people who have not yet learned to pretend that they like something when they don't. And perhaps that is the greatest compliment we can pay children's illustrators. They work for the most honest critics in the world.
The Grandma bought a little book about Domènech i Montaner at Sant Pau. She thought she was buying a book about an architect. She was. But when she opened it and recognised Pilarín Bayés' drawings, she discovered something else inside. Cavall Fort. Childhood. Catalan. Books. Drawings. Memory. The strange feeling of recognising something that has accompanied you for so long that you had almost forgotten how important it once was. And perhaps that is what great children's illustrators ultimately do.
They draw pictures for us when we are children. Then we grow up. We read other books. We visit museums. We discover other artists. We become adults and believe that we have left those little illustrated worlds behind. Until one afternoon, many years later, we open a book. We recognise a drawing. And suddenly realise that those worlds never left us at all. Because some people illustrate books. And some people, without knowing it, illustrate our childhood.
Gràcies, Pilarín.
More information: Instagram-Pilarín Bayés
i inventar-te com serà el futur.
Drawing gives you the freedom to recreate the past
and imagine what the future will be like.
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