Eliza Ivanova

The Bulgarian illustrator tells Gary Evans how her dark, haunting fine art feeds into her day job as a 3D animator working at Pixar, and vice versa.

Look at Eliza Ivanova’s art – the melting faces, the drowned bodies, the personifications of death – and you don’t think: that’s a Pixar artist at work. It’s all but impossible to see an image like Initiation (pictured left) and connect it to the artist who worked on family film favourite Cars 2. It appears to be two different types of art, and it appears to come from two different places.

Eliza grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. Her parents said she could draw before she could speak – and particularly enjoyed scribbling in their passports. Aged eight, she started art classes. By the age of 12 she had enrolled in art classes at the atelier of Bulgarian artist and playwright Garo Muradian. This was the beginning of her “real education.” Muradian taught her almost everything she knows, but he also instilled a lasting appreciation of aesthetics.

By now, figure drawing was an “obsession.” Eliza’s father would buy her academic art books from russia. She had no idea what they said. The books hadn’t been translated into Bulgarian. Eliza was interested in the pictures: this was the standard she aspired to. The books, the classes… it was all preparation for a traditional fine art education the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. At least, it was supposed to be.

At high school, Eliza became interested in film. That led her to the discipline she saw as a mix of art and film: “Animation was always an interest of mine because I couldn’t wrap my head around how a human hand could create such complex movement with drawings. It was the draftsmanship rather than the performance that drew me in initially.”

THE COST OF STUDYING ART