“When you put a line down with your human hand with a brush or a pen or whatever it is, there's the sense of the living line. It has my heartbeat in it.”
Illustrator Aodh Ó Riagáin grew up thrilling to the exploits of comic book heroes, and at 26 they now have their own alter ego. Not long after they decided to make the leap into the life of a working artist, they adopted the moniker Oreganillo. The name is a portmanteau of sorts, combining the English translation of Aodh’s surname with the playful affix “illo.” That “illo” is “short for illustrator but also short for illogical,” according to Aodh, and it also adds a phonetic flair that suits their current home. As Oreganillo tells it, there’s no shortage of inspiration in Lisbon, but the mythology of their native Ireland is still a huge influence on their work.
Creator Collective: You’re in good company out there in Lisbon. Do you feel like the city has become a bit of an artist’s haven?
Oreganillo: It's a beautiful thing that everybody in Lisbon is from somewhere else. Obviously apart from the Portuguese, but it's a completely international city. I absolutely love it. An amazing huge amount of artists here from all over the world. So yeah, it's inspiring being among them. The cost of living being more manageable, it's very important. Especially for young artists, artists who aren't really up in their career, you need to be able to take risks. Things being more affordable is tantamount to that.
CC: So walk us through your typical day, if you have a typical one. Are you disciplined about the hours you spend working on your art or do you get it done at different times of the day?
O: I would say for the past number of years I have been a night owl and the consequence of that is the morning time during the day and the early parts of the day are very distracting for me because first you've got to wake up, eat breakfast and you've got to drink your coffee, settle yourself and you've got to shower and clean your room and get your affairs in order. So you've got to see some people, maybe see some friends and then somebody wants to call you and somebody wants to email you and you have to deal with your practical things. Maybe I will try to work but the fact of the matter is that to get into a true flow state you need uninterrupted time. So you need to be able to work for a number of hours without saying “Okay, I'm hungry again, I need to go eat and watch something afterwards.” Usually I am most productive after dinner. Not that other kinds of productivity won’t happen previous to that but I would say it's productivity that's more about restoration. Doing yoga or eating or showering or seeing people, having a little bit of work life balance, that's what the sunlight hours are for.
CC: I’m guessing just from your description of the flow state that you’re one of those artists who sees the internet as a help but also a hindrance.
O: Yes, 100 percent. It’s really a blessing and a curse.
CC: More of one than the other, maybe?
O: It's impossible to know what it would have been like to be a 20th century artist without phones or without social media. We live in strange and unprecedented times. Social media in general is something I think about as a necessary evil but it's definitely one that I begrudge. I think it takes up too much of your brain space and being conscious of things like algorithms and all of this is noise that I think doesn't contribute to the best kind of work being produced at the end of the day.
CC: You’ve got a sizeable portfolio of both animation and comics work. What are you drawn toward lately?
O: This year has really had a lot of animation in it. Hand drawn animation which I've only really started I think when I came to Lisbon, in fairness. I'd done a few animation projects before that but then I got a few commissions when I came here and there was some projects for a theater festival and various other things. And the thing about hand drawn animation is that it suddenly I was like, “Wow, I can realize anything. I can make a whole film.”
It's also more accessible a medium than comics. That's one thing I've realized about comics. When I properly started, I think when I was around 18 or 19 I said let me begin this crazy career and I started publishing comics online and finding small press sites but in general what I find is I don't think that is the best medium to read comics. Really people want something that is in their hands that they can have this personal relationship to. Smell the paper, all of this.
CC: You’ve made no secret about your love for hand-drawn animation specifically, which seems really labor-intensive. Is it something about the process that you enjoy or is it all about the look of the finished product?
O: It's completely labor-intensive. We live in such a digital dominant world and a lot of the work you would see has this kind of cold line. That's the way I would describe it: the line itself is almost a dead line. Whereas when you put a line down with your human hand with a brush or a pen or whatever it is, there's the sense of the living line. It has my heartbeat in it. It has maybe my shakes and the same idiosyncrasies that my comics work might have.
Hand drawn animation has also made me faster, just altogether a more well-rounded artist because you do have to do a huge amount of work in a very small amount of time. And again, you realize why people like [Jack] Kirby are so powerful because they are working at this deadline speed. And the style that comes out, that's the true style. It's whatever is getting it done on time.
All this is to say I'm very motivated by Memento Mori. You know, one of the things that makes art meaningful to me and any of the crafts of human beings, whether it's this chair or this cabinet here is that a human being with mortal hours and the clock ticking and all this sort of stuff put their time into the fine details. In any given movie or any given comic or whatever it is you can zoom in on a microscopic detail and you can see this little attention to detail. Even if you don't notice it or even if it passes you by, there's this little caring touch. There's something that moves me about that. It makes it mythical again because of mortality, because of all these things. There's something about traditional art that speaks to me more loudly than digital.
And by the way, not to discourage any digital art. Someone like Emmeli [Markegaard] is an absolute master at it and the level of craft is completely off the scale.
CC: You live with dyspraxia [a neurological condition that primarily affects motor skills and coordination]. I can imagine how that might affect your daily life but does it affect your approach to art at all?
O: For many years -- and I think I still do -- I held the pen wrong. So my grip strength, I would sort of hold the pen too strong and hold it too tightly, maybe. When I pencil sketch it has no order. It's just like a thunderstorm. Like a rain cloud. And when people look at it, you can make no heads or tails of it. I think it definitely affects the creative work I do and the kind of pattern recognition I do. I have a slightly, I think, free-association creative style which works for some people and really does not work for other people.
Like, one subject I'm really interested in is Irish mythology and they have this really key idea of the ceantar and the altar. In Irish, it basically means the material world and the spiritual world or the dream world. And a lot of times, half my life is spent in a world that is not this one. I'm gardening otherworldly gardens and then you have to return and get back into whatever this world is. And I think a part of the difficulties of dyspraxia make that other world slightly more attractive, probably because one aspect of dyspraxia is difficulty understanding social cues. Social cues and just … I'm an eccentric person. Some people really respond to it and some people do not.
CC: I guess that’s one way art helps to level the playing field, right? You have time to show people who you are without having to filter it through conversation.
O: Precisely. You always feel limited. When somebody asks me a question I always retrospectively say “I should have said this” and “I went on too long a tangent” or whatever it was. It just feels like such a limited medium, is oral communication.
Just in terms of dealing with it physically though, yoga is very important. Hand-drawn animation and comics and all these kind of things are very physically intense on your body. When you are crunching to hit the deadline, whatever it is, your body can increasingly get into this hedgehog shape and yoga has been one of those things that has just -- without yoga I could not sustain any of this and I encourage any and all artists to do it. Because you can do it on YouTube in 20 minutes and it's an amazing way to heal your body, heal the spine and without that none of this gets done.
CC: You mentioned Irish mythology. Other than having been born there, what fascinates you about that? And does it have a throughline in your attraction to comic book art and superheroes, which I suppose are the gateway that most people discover that stuff?
O: When I was a kid I was all about the superhero stuff. That would have been my main entry way to my imagination. But then increasingly I realized that I had a very Americanized identity because Ireland obviously is a colonized country. It's a postcolonial country. And we are also culturally colonized in a lot of ways. And American culture is among the most dominant. Like, the influence of Hollywood is obviously massive. A lot of people when they meet me, they think I am American or Canadian. I have a very subtle Irish accent and so ...
CC: Especially in Lisbon, I can imagine.
O: Yeah, yeah. And so the older I get I really grapple with my sense of identity. What I found was by going back to Irish mythology, all of the things, all the bombastic imagination that is present in superheroes and everything Jack Kirby or somebody like that does is present in Irish mythology.
It was originally an oral storytelling tradition. So it wasn't in writing originally. What people did, it was the way they made a map of the landscape. Quite literally every, if you go back to the Irish place names, there's various rivers named after various goddesses and hills named after various goddesses and gods. You know, the landscape is completely rich with myth. And it's just become again, very de-colonial. That's the thing. Because I don't speak the Irish language. I have so many aspects of my identity that are colonized. That's not going to change. But I guess it's a collective imagination that I can bring forward and bring into different mediums like comics, like animation and in the future into film.
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