When I finally understand what is that I need to draw, I draft until I define the piece. That process can last from one week to three months.
I tear the tale apart, I understand it, conceptualize it, and imagine it. “I don’t literally illustrate what I read. Karina points out the following ones, specially: Maurilia, a city that reflects what happens today in old cities when a contemporary one grows at their side and they don’t talk to each other Olivia, a place where the rich city exists thanks to the productivity of the working city Eufemia, a trade city, as many port cities are. Any person who has read the texts by the Italian writer has related an imaginary city with an authentic one. Some cities are closer to becoming a reality. This is why it is a personal project, because it’s mine, it moves at my pace, at my time and in the way Calvino and I want to imagine it”. And it gives me such great pleasure to do it. I have the urge to illustrate his tales, every single one of them. I read Calvino’s cities and visualize them immediately. It is a look of the city from a human being’s heart, a citizen, not an urban planner or architect. “It’s a treasure, a book told from literature and not from technique. Not even the author herself knows where this project will lead. She has illustrated 23 cities in four years. Recreating Calvino’s impossible architecture is increasingly taking up more time and attention. “Even so, I would not change my career choice now. Sometimes she illustrates all night and into the next day. She used to work as an urban planner/architect by day and as an artist by night. She defines herself as “an architect who draws”. I decided to illustrate the book so my son would understand it, also for fun because I enjoyed it”. Luckily, I really liked the drawing, showed it to a friend of mine who’s an architect and it was then that we remembered Calvino’s book.
“I had seen so many things when we analyzed the problems in our city, it was overwhelming. “A clear contrast when it comes to lifestyle”, Karina answers.
It showed a hilltop neighborhood (with all the problems emerging settlements face) and an imaginary city underneath public spaces, vegetation, water, cultural activities, art, and color. Two years later, any given day, she sat at the table and spontaneously draw a very small city she called “the city underneath the city”. She had been practicing her traces for 10 years. On the other hand, she had always felt an attraction for art. There, she faced the design of a city as complex as Lima. Six years ago, Karina quit her job in the private sector as an architect and migrated to the public sector.
Karina Puente has been physically recreating the magic of these unreal metropolises for four years now. Italian writer Italo Calvino (1972) describes 55 cities in his book Invisible Cities ( Le Città Invisibili).
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