Clubul Ilustratorilor

Since its very beginning (2005), the Illustrators’ Club Romania has had the vocation to make the impossible, possible and the pride to dress the world in shapes and colors of its own liking. We have had the chance to build everything from scratch. Not within the framework of an official program, but on our own, as in an afterschool class.

There was no great tradition in Romanian book illustrations, so therefore breaking away from this tradition was radical and took almost 15 years. The world after 1989 did not have anything in common with the world before the Revolution anymore, and it was not easy to find points of continuity with tradition.

In the beginning we were 10. The members of the board were a few students, a few graduates, and their graphic art teacher: Stela Lie, of the National University of Arts Bucharest. We had decided to set up the Club to stay together, to share our common interest in illustration and all sorts of other art forms, and to help each other in our creative processes.

We participated in the most important book fairs in Europe. We have had several international projects, including group exhibitions, conferences, book fairs participation, workshops for children/ adults, illustrated books for children.

We were ten members then; we are sixty-eight now. Some hold full-time jobs in advertising, design companies, or publishing houses, others are freelancers, hopping from one project to the next, depending on request. We are not the only illustrators in Romania, but we may have opened some doors with our work for everybody else interested in illustration.