From Fine Art to Comics: An Interview With Maria Rostocka

kadr_komiksu_do_magazynu_zwierciadlo.jpg, default, From Fine Art to Comics: An Interview With Maria Rostocka, Illustration for Zwierciadło magazine, drawn by Maria Rostocka, photo: courtesy of the illustrator, center, #000000

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Michał Chudoliński talks with artist Maria Rostocka, the author of Koniec Lipca (The End of July), who grew up in Poland and France. Her evocative storytelling, building upon her background as a painter and poster artist, has earned her a unique place in the international comics landscape.

Michał Chudoliński (MC): How did a graduate in Painting and Poster Design become interested in comics?

MR: When choosing a course of study, you usually only vaguely know what you’re interested in. And even if you know more precisely what you want to do, there’s not much to choose from in terms of art courses in our country. So, I only had a choice between painting, a course for those interested in fine arts, and graphic design, the domain of applied art. I chose painting.

Thumbnail — Maria Rostocka, photo: courtesy of the illustrator

In the course of your studies, you discover your strengths; you decide what’s important to you and what truly interests you. I felt something was missing in single paintings. I started to look further for a new method. At the same time, comics was evolving into a much more ambitious and interesting medium, and, in a way, it was heading in the direction that I was coming from. We met halfway. In a place that allows formal and narrative experiments. A place where you can tell your stories just the way you want to.

MC: What are your experiences with foreign markets? How do they differ from Poland?

MR: In France, comic books are considered literature. They have their own section in the national book institute; there are grants for creators and subsidies for small publishers. That’s why it’s a big and diverse market that can accommodate both commercial and less commercial projects. You don’t have to constantly think about the profitability of a project. Artists have a lot of freedom, and they’re allowed to grow.

In Poland, on the other hand, there is no dedicated grant program. Comics fall somewhere between literature and visual arts. It could belong to both domains, but I get the feeling it belongs to neither. If any public institution decides to finance a comic project, it’s always some work commissioned by officials, with minor artistic value. Meanwhile, publishers have to focus on profit to survive.

MC: You won a competition for a comic about the Warsaw Uprising. What does that historical event mean to you now, what do you associate it with? How do you think it’s perceived abroad?

MR: As a teenager, I thought it was very romantic to fight for a lost cause. Now it just makes me very sad.

Poles present it as a military operation, which is why it is perceived as a battle in WWII history. But in truth, it was primarily the absolutely unprecedented, horrific retaliation that turned Warsaw's Uprising into such a tragedy. To me, the fact that Polish resistance fighters fought the Nazi Germans in some parts of the city is secondary to that, especially if you compare the number of victims on both sides. I still admire their courage, but the massacre remains the most significant part of those events.

A special military unit of the most dangerous rapists and killers freed from German prisons, moving street after street, brutally killing men, women, and children, and burning all buildings to the ground, killing 200,000 civilians and destroying 80% of the city. We should cry for Warsaw. It seems more appropriate than pride and anger.

I think people around the world should cry for Warsaw. They should sing songs like The Rains of Castamere from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

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Four illustrations by Maria Rostocka, made for Strapazin The Comic Magazine, photo: courtesy of the author

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MC: What’s your work process? Paul Pope said in a recent interview that comics require a huge determination to make. I assume that a painted comic book takes even more effort.

MR: I take a lot of notes and make many messy sketches. After a while I try to organise them using a complicated system of arrows and numbers, which appears messy too. Later, of course, I need to sit down and paint the thing. I use gouache on cardboard. It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time, but I’m very critical of my own artwork, and I’m rarely satisfied with the result right away.

When I started making comics, I was mainly focused on the visual aspect and wanted to make some really incredible artwork. I truly am very proud of what I achieved in my debut, The Bear, the Cat and the Rabbit. Being responsible for the artwork and the story changed my perspective. I feel more like a movie director, trying to make everything work together. Now I’m more into the concept than the artwork itself. I’m not sure it will shorten the time of creation though, because I’m horribly critical of everything I do.

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Panel from Bear, Cat and Rabbit, drawings by Maria Rostocka, story by Michał Rostocki, 2012, Photo: Kultura Gniewu

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MC: ‘The Bear, the Cat, and the Rabbit’ feels like a dream, or more precisely a nightmare. How do you feel about that comic, looking back? Where does your love of surrealism and a downbeat atmosphere, both in terms of story and visuals, come from?

MR: I wanted to make a comic book where the art itself would tell the story. One in which I could go wild with my painting abilities. Michał [Rostocki, the writer of The Bear, the Cat, and the Rabbit] wrote a twisted story in which it’s difficult to tell who’s good and who’s bad, and to determine the meaning of words. I like this album very much – the way it’s enigmatic, but also universal. It was great to work on this project together. But it’s primarily Michał’s story and his love of surrealism.

Later on, each of us wanted to work on our own projects separately. I wanted to write and draw my own comic stories, and Michał wanted to make indie games instead of comic books. And I can see he feels most comfortable being the sole creator – responsible for the story, the graphics, and the code.

MC: In your latest album, you take a look at difficult interpersonal relationships in provincial Poland. Is this a topic that’s important to you? Do you feel that people have insecurities due to their background, that there are divisions in society between descendants of nobility and peasantry (pointed out, for instance, by the writer Szczepan Twardoch)?

MR: It’s certainly a good thing to put the record straight about certain aspects of our past which have never been fully recounted. The world has changed since, and I feel these false narratives are not eligible anymore. I fully support speaking openly about the terrible situation not only of the peasants, but also women, Jews, Roma people, bastards, orphans, atheists and many others. About the fact that the nobility did not represent any higher moral code, but on the contrary, it was heartlessly feeding off the misery of so many people. Szczepan Twardoch calls for the truth to be said about Polish peasants being in fact white slaves, and that the former social system was built on violence. It is definitely something we should strive towards.

To me, any inferiority complex people from rural areas may have today results from poverty, because people are always ashamed of being poor. It’s not rooted in the past – it’s a contemporary economic problem.

I’m trying to portray the countryside without stereotypes, without caricatures. And without divisions. Those differences are illusory. In reality people are all very much the same. Only the setting changes.

MC: In your author bio, you mention your interest in psychology and psychotherapy. What do you think are particular Polish faults in interpersonal relationships? What should we as a society work on? I’m also curious how you define a happy, fulfilled life.

MR: This was something that brought a lot of confusion and has been misinterpreted in many ways: that I like to portray psychological problems in comics, or that I am promoting the use of comics in psychology, and even that I’m into making therapeutic comics. None of this is true.

A few years ago, I entered a postgraduate studies program in Art Therapy and got my professional diploma last autumn. Art therapy, far from being painting lessons for mental-health patients, is a therapy technique where you can help people deal with their issues from a different angle, using artistic techniques like drawing, acting, sculpting, et cetera. Preferably many techniques at the same time. The pandemic cut short my activity in this area, as it’s a form of group therapy. But I do find it fascinating and will go back to practicing as an art therapist once the pandemic is over. I acquired a new profession precisely to have a job apart from my artistic activities, because being an artist is very frustrating.

I don’t have any strict definition of happiness, although the idea of doing something essential in our society seems close to one, the ideal being a medical doctor. Art is a struggle. Happy artist is an oxymoron. I needed a job that would have a more direct purpose. I chose art therapy because it’s a medical profession in which I could make use of my artistic experience. And as I was studying the subject, my way of perceiving the role of culture and creation in people’s life started to change. I saw and understood how essential it was. It blew my mind.

MC: Abroad, mainly in the US, psychotherapy has been popularised for a few years now using comic books, superheroes, and popular culture. Do you plan to use the achievements of psychology and psychotherapy in your artistic work?

MR: I guess they both meet when I portray human characters. People fascinate me in general, but I do not intend to make any self-help comic books of any kind. I have no plans to mix therapy and comics. There are many creators who do it much better than I ever could. My genre is closer to the 19th-century realistic and psychological novels of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Maria Dąbrowska, only in comic book form.

MC: I assume you created ‘The End of July’ long before the pandemic. Do you feel the situation in Poland changed during the pandemic, either for better or for worse?

MR: It’s funny, because around the world, visual artists say pretty much the same: that their daily life hasn’t changed much during the pandemic. They still work alone, in their studios or at home; they get online assignments and prepare work for publication or artistic events to come in the distant future. Of course, I did miss meeting people and going places, and I was sometimes fed up with my family being home all the time. Usually, I’m not very good at keeping a decent work-life balance, so I felt there were more people I was sharing this experience with. That’s even satisfying in a way... But I don’t feel that there’s a major change on the way.

MC: What are your creative plans for the future?

MR: More books. Writing and drawing. I’ve slowly started to work on a new graphic novel that’s been on my mind for a while. I also plan to make a picture book for children.

I’ll still be promoting The End of July in Poland and, starting in autumn, at comics events in France. I’ll also be doing some exhibitions of my original artwork from the book and other artwork. Maybe some new projects will pop up. I often hear about people being spotted on the street and asked to star in a movie, or other magical strokes of luck – but these things never happen to me. So my most probable artistic future is me working on my book.

MC: With ‘The End of July’, did you try to kickstart a new genre – slow comics – just like there are slow movies?

MR: First and foremost I wanted to create an album that would be different, that would do what only comics can do. An album full of images and scenes that allow us to paint a complete picture in our heads, one that forces us to think. Unlike movies, comics don’t enforce the speed of viewing, so we have time to contemplate what we’re reading.

I have no idea whether it’s possible to consciously start a new genre, but it’s a very flattering suggestion.

MC: One of the reviewers said that ‘[‘The End of July’ is] an emotion-based story about grown-ups who cannot be depended upon. And about children who lack support and need to find a way to deal with adolescence on their own’. Do you think there are many such immature grown-ups and grown-up children in Poland? Or maybe this is a more universal problem?

MR: I see it more as a phenomenon than a problem. Maybe social norms are not as strict as they used to be, and people get to be themselves more… who knows?

In many reviews of my book, people refer to the problems in the family as pathological. It really surprised me, because these are in no way pathological issues. These are regular issues. There are problems inside every family. People fight sometimes – relationships between people aren’t perfect, and no family is ideal. There are loud fights, or there are parents dismissing problems, but that doesn’t make them go away. Being a single parent just happens – a mother being tired of taking care of two toddlers is also something rather common.

I think people refuse to accept it as normal because you never get to see a family from the inside like that. Everyone tries to keep a perfect outside image, saying: ‘That’s not us, we’re perfect. This only happens in heavily dysfunctional families’. But that’s not true.

In my book, the plot goes against the popular notion that through genetics, upbringing and education, a parent gets to shape a child’s personality. A child is a person in their own right – what they do is not always the consequence of what they are exposed to. In a good way or in a bad way. We are only to some degree entitled to their success or responsible for their failures. My characters are not doomed; they are all making choices. Only not always the right ones. Not taking any action is also a choice.

Maria Rostocka is an illustrator, a comics artist, and a painter, who also recently became a licensed art therapist. Born in Warsaw before the collapse of the Communist Bloc, raised in both Poland and France, she studied Painting and Poster Design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She’s the author of the graphic novel Koniec Lipca (The End of July), which was chosen as the best Polish comic book of 2020 at the International Comic Book and Game Festival in Łódź and published in France in 2021. She lives in Warsaw, Poland.

Interview conducted in English, Jun 2021

Language English

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contemporary polish illustration

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contemoprary polish literature