Meeting my —almost— forgotten self

A brief introspection exercise

Raúl Gil
Raúl Gil
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

Recently, I published my new illustration portfolio. In doing so, and considering that my work as an illustrator is more personal than my work as a graphic designer, I decided that my website should talk about me in a personal way. I don’t like very much cold and impersonal ‘About’ sections, and I had the need to link my person and my work as I had never done before.

So in addition to including the mentioned ‘About me’ section, I decided to offer a small collection of favourites and/or recommendations. Not that it’s a new idea. In fact, I have always been very grateful for this kind of content from the hand of designers or artists that I admire. Frank Chimero’s website is a good example of this.

I decided to fragment the selection of favourites into different sub-sections, containing eight suggestions for each one.


Meeting with myself

After 36 years of life, there are many books read, many records listened to, many films watched… How to summarize your preferences in only eight for each category? First, doing an introspection exercise.

The only indispensable premise was to recommend what would truly have been inspiring or shocking to the point of generating changes in me, even if they were merely aesthetic.

Interestingly, when the list was quite advanced, I started to see a clear —though not particularly surprising— pattern. The vast majority of everything proposed coincided chronologically in a particular decade. The 1990s. As born in 1980, the 90s probably represented the decade of greatest intensity in my life, coinciding with the end of my childhood, the development of my entire adolescence and my arrival into adulthood, plus one of my richer intellectual stages in every way.


Surprises

If I analyze my last 10 years, I would say that if there is a musical genre that has predominated in my day to day, it has undoubtedly been hard rock or metal, in all its variants. However, only one Doom Metal record (Wildhoney, from Tiamat) has been part of my final selection.

My music selection in 2017

I realise that trip hop, progressive rock, electronic and experimental music in general have defined much of my musical culture. And curiously, these days my attention to this kind of music is somehow neglected on my part.

But in spite of it, I consider it essential and nothing I have heard since 2000 could replace it. I believe it doesn’t have so much to do with nostalgia but with the moment of my personal, intimate development in which that music came to me.


Mysteries

I have also encountered some mysteries, which go beyond surprise. This is the case of animated series such as Clémentine, of which I barely retain a vague memory and which I have not really revisited until very recently.

The concept of opponent or antagonist in Clémentine was especially obscure for its time

It really had an impact on me. Experiences such as that provided by Clémentine certainly have much more to do with a child’s mind and the power that certain stimuli can have on it. I will dedicate a specific post to this little known but not forgotten 1985 French series soon.

However, it is possible that Clémentine ignited in me that strange fascination for the bizarre, the hidden, the not apparent… perhaps even a first contact with that duality between good and evil that so elemental seems from the perspective of an adult.


Thematic patterns

If we take a look at the cinematographic selection, it is clear that the themes are very specific: science fiction predominates in clear fashion, especially when it is linked to a particular type of existential reflection: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, etc.

A certain pattern of terror connected to the notion of feeling trapped in a hostile environment is also very present — The Thing, Alien…— something that we could consider natural and instinctively human.

We can find as well a contact with a different way of understanding what surrounds us. Sometimes between dream and reality, conscious and unconscious: Eraserhead and, again, The Matrix.

Four of the eight very classic films selected

So: to ask about the future, to ask about the nature of oneself and its relationship with what surrounds us, to ask about what we intuit but which is not totally apparent, to the point that most would ignore it. All this is very ‘me’. But it also is unequivocally proper to the human being as such.

Be that as it may, finding out all this has helped me define myself and understand me better. To settle clearly what I consider my personal basis.


Not so pleasant discoveries

One of the most negative parts of the exercise has been realising how incredibly hard was to select eight important/influential books. I felt a certain disappointment when I realised that there are few, very few books that I consider really important in my life, despite considering myself an eager reader. And almost all of them are related to philosophy, folklore and traditions or occultism— although I tried to diversify the final selection adding several sub-categories like ‘novel’, art book’, ‘essay’, ‘monograph’, etc.


Do it yourself

So to conclude, we can say that personal development and the mental or emotional state of each moment has much to do with what impacts us deeply. Despite the obviousness of this reflection, I believe that doing an exercise of this kind, always carried out with the utmost sincerity and introspection possible, is highly recommendable, since observing what you consider to be vital for your cultural formation throws clues on many personal facets.

Meeting all these small inspirational works of my past has made me recover somehow part of the fascinations and hopes that have served me as a creative fuel for much of my life.

I invite you to visit my list of favourites and to create your own. And to draw personal conclusions about the result of all this. I hope it is as refreshing and interesting for you as it has been for me.


You can know more about me on my website. You can also follow me on Twitter or Dribbble. And if you found the article interesting, share it! :-) Thanks for reading.

Raúl Gil

Written by

Raúl Gil

Illustrator and designer. Perpetual learner. Telling visual and interactive stories.

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