Meet Adrian Barbu

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adrian Barbu a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Adrian with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

I’ve got my work ethic as a kid, from my stepfather (that doesn’t mean I started applying it that soon; I didn’t even remember it until much later).
He used to tell me and my stepbrother, his natural son, ” I don’t really believe you useless lot are ever going to do something worthwhile in your life; but if, by a miracle, you will, hear me well: do it AS IF IT WERE FOR YOURSELF.
“If you were a tailor, make for tour customer a suit you’d be proud to wear.
“If you were a carpenter, make a table you;’d be proud to sit at.
“If you were a builder, build a house you’d be proud to live in.
“Just because it’s made for someone else doesn’t mean it has to be of lesser quality.
‘And always try to do or give more that you;ve been asked to.”

In time, it has become a mantra. Not the Useless Lot part, though 🙂

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My name is Adrian, and I’m a Romanian visual artist, book illustrator, and a comics/graphic novel author,
I have graduated at the Faculty of Letters of the Babes-Bolyai University, and also at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Art and Design University, both in Cluj-Napoca, my hometown.

My first comics story has been published in 1986, so my career in comics and illustration extends over almost four decades,
It has evolved quite irregularly during my study and early professional years, has developed into a stable part-time job since 1995, besides teaching French language at several faculties of the University, and has become a full-time job in 2012. Since then, I work mainly for an illustration, comics and animation studio, with private assignments and contracts from Romanian and foreign publishers in my free time.

My artwork, be it book illustration, comics, storyboarding, character design or pre-producion work for animations, has been published or exhibited in the US, Canada, several European countries, Australia and New Zealand.

Aside my work, I’m also involved in organizing and conducting drawing classes and workshops in schools or public libraries, doing facepainting or juggling at fundraising events for humanitary causes (especially for children), art therapy workshops, most of it as a volunteer .

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I’ll put the three essential qualities in the form of advices.

The first would be Resilience. There’s no wasy way to reach tour goal. Inevitably you’ll meet obstacles, creative blocks, disappointments and setbacks, you’ll stumble, fall and fail. The essential thing here is Always Get Up and Go On.
Failure is basically a result of giving up too early.

Then there’s Patience. Dont dream of having Everything, At Once, and Without effort. Nobody’s born already skilled. What we call “skill” is essentially an acquired ease in doing things. And acquiring any skill takes time, tolerance towards frustration and step-by-step self-building. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can,

Finally, there’s Honesty. Fortitude. Towards yourself and everybody else. Never promise what you can’t provide, and always try to see yourself the way you are. Neither better, nor worse. An unrealistic self-image is often the cause of self-deception, followed either by disappointment, or by the Unrecognized Genius syndrome. And we don’t need, nor want any of these.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

Most definitely, the obstacles.
I’ve been a sickly child, small, thin, and weak, so my parents have done their best to protect me from exessive effort, stress, or exhaustion. In time, their attitude, no matter how well-ment, has become overprotective under several slogans like “you’ll never be able to do that”, “it’s beyond your capabilities”, or “that’s too hard for you”. In the first eight school years I’ve been exempt and excused from sport classes, on medical grounds. But all weak children dream of being Superman, and I was no exception. I took judo classes in a local dojo without them knowing about it and, at the beginning of my ninth grade, I threw away the medical exemption paper and joined the sports classes.
Later in my last high school year, I wanted to become a college student. They said that would be beyond my capabilities, and I’d better get an easy job somewhere near home, So of course, I applied for faculty, went to the admission exams… and failed. So I started working in a factory.
At the time, in communist Romania, military service was mandatory. Exemptions were possible, however, on medical grounds, So when the call to the preliminary presentation at the local military headquarters, they sent me, armed with a thick file full of medical papers, which I never showed to the officers there. And I was rewarded with two years of military service.
After that, i returned to the factory and it took me another two years of studying on my own, and another session of failed exams until I was admitted to the Faculty of Letters.
I attended the Faculty for Graphic Arts almost twenty years later, and had to be an art student while working as a teacher, drawing comics and illustrating books.
I’ve told you all this just to emphasize an idea that, meanwhile, has become the basic guideline of my life: obstacles, challenges and failures aren’t give-up signals; they’re teachers to learn from, stairs to climb, walls to jump over or gates to break down.
I came to believe that important things never come easily; if they do, they’re not worth having.
And maybe the only real value such things possess is given by the hardships we went through to obtain them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.behance.net/Graphite_Ro
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adrian.barbu.754