Plants in beautiful compositions, textured leaves with hands and legs, faceless feminine figures – Renaissance subtlety, in black and white. The “Plant studies” graphics of one of our editors, Réka Vikárius have been recently printed on the cool boards of Canadian skateboard brand Landyachtz.
Réka is a forever pathfinder – she always starts something new, she focuses on many things simultaneously, at the same time everything she works on heads in the same direction somehow. After she finished her studies in Cluj-Napoca as a landscape architect and designer, experiencing the difficulties there, she felt that she needed a shift of perspective. To this end, putting creation in the background, she decided that she wanted to support domestic designers and the development of design culture. This is how she ended up at the department of art and design management of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, from where she graduated three years ago.
Drawing has been an important and dominant part of her life since her childhood. “It always had a therapeutic effect on me: if I draw, my mind turns off, I can dive in completely and nothing else lingers in my head during that time. Maybe my love and respect for design and creation is what is certain and permanent in my life, and my approach to them changes constantly” – Réka told us.
She likes contemporary art a lot, but what amazes her the most is Renaissance works of art and the human portrayal of the era. She was also greatly inspired by drawing figures and body parts, and her interest in the exciting shapes of plants comes from the proximity to nature she experienced in her childhood in Transylvania. “The combination of details of the human body and the plant world is virtually the manifestation of my personality, in the form of a drawing. I consider myself a more closed type of person, this is why I only show details on the drawings, while the plants symbolize some kind of longing for the old days” – she added.
Once she had a few new drawings lined up, she created her own Behance page (supported and encouraged by her environment), and the message from Canadian board brand Landyachtz saying that they were interested in her Plant studies graphics series came the next day. “They had completely free hand in creating the board, but they told me in advance that they didn’t want to modify the graphics too much. Although they showed me a preliminary layout, it was more exciting to see that someone approaches my work and gives new life to it from a new angle. A clean, maybe a bit more serious and elegant board was created, under the name Garden. Although I never skated before, I think the airiness of the illustration communicates well with the freedom of skateboarding. I’ll sure try it out once I got mine!”
In addition to constantly looking for new opportunities for valuable collaborations, as a responsible brand, Landyachtz also launched an initiative titled One Board One Tree, this way anyone who orders a board from them also gets to support a good cause.
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Vikárius Réka | Behance
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