Colorful Budapest - Bird's Eye View Map - Limited Edition Drawing

Bela Magyar is a Budapest, Hungary-based architect, graphic artist, and designer. His faithful love belongs to the metropolis, Budapest. Since his early childhood, he has been living there, and his personal development as an artist and designer is wholly intertwined with the city's metamorphosis. This background makes his understanding and knowledge of the details and hidden corners of the city a part of himself and his work. Bela graduated as an architect at the Technical University of Budapest in 1981. He has worked with the architects' primary tool: technical pen (Rapidograph) until the digital world's advent. 1979-1986 – Surrealistic fantasy cityscapes. 1989 – Bird's eye view cityscapes of actual cities - looking like illustrations of children's stories. Budapest, Hungary, Szentendre – these large map-like illustrations are not accurate maps. They represent the essence, the summary of the city, view through the artist's eyes. Being an architect, Bela constructed and built the houses and bridges rather than merely sketching them because he knows what happens behind the walls and under the houses' roof. Bela tells stories about the city with his ink lines, stories about houses, buildings, buses, an underground railway that you cannot see anymore – they were buried, demolished, rebuilt long ago. In contrast to the simplified, faceless, stereotype visual experience of computer effects, his bird's eye view maps have many things for you to discover and to marvel about for hours, weeks, or even months. They allow questions to arise in the viewer; they raise interest and arouse the desire to discover all the life depicted in the pictures. The writing technique of Gabriel García Márquez inspired his drawing approach. Bela made the bird's eye view maps with a technical pen on tracing paper. Nowadays, the artist still works freehand but with a digital pen on a digital tablet.