One Long Day, Drawn by Paweł Jońca

Paweł Jońca can draw a feeling in about four shapes. A big man in a blue cardigan sips from a doll-sized cup next to a teddy bear. A woman pole vaults in heels with her handbag still on her shoulder. A fried egg winks at you. Each picture lands in about a second, and then keeps working on you for a lot longer than that.

Jońca (often written Pawel Jonca) is a Polish illustrator who has spent two decades drawing for magazines, usually the stories that have no obvious picture: worry, burnout, ambition, love that has gone a little sideways. His figures are rubbery and simple, the palettes are loud, and a crayon grain runs over everything so nothing ever looks slick. He also sells his work as posters through his own shop, which is where we’d send you if any of these get stuck in your head. We’ve been staring at this batch for a week. Our favorite is the ironworker sharing lunch with a robot, and we’ll get to why.

So we did something a little different with them. Below, sixteen of his pictures are laid out as one long day, from the first cup of tea to whatever keeps you up at 2am. First, though, look at the colors.

Almost every one of his pictures starts from a single flat ground color, and laid end to end they read like the sky over a day: bright blue, a warm afternoon, a slow slide into the dark. Tap any stripe to jump ahead.

6:45 am

Morning, Slowly

The day starts with tea, at a table built for a six year old. The man is far too big for the furniture and doesn’t seem to mind.

His eyes are closed, his pinky is very nearly out, and the teddy bear across from him is listening politely. Little white stars are scattered over his face and hands, like he’s still partly asleep.

Now look at the teapot. That small red heart is the first one. There are more.

8:20 am

Running Late

Jońca loves a deadline. A man in a bowler hat sprints with his umbrella furled, and a cuckoo has sprung out of his wristwatch to tell him what he already knows. Beside him, a scooter rider threads the gap between two trucks with a three tier wedding cake balanced on his helmet, plastic wrap and all. Somebody’s whole afternoon depends on that cake. He looks completely calm!

Notice how little is in either picture. No street signs, no crowd, no traffic lights. Two trucks are the whole city. That economy is what we keep coming back to in his work: he leaves out everything the idea doesn’t need. It’s the same instinct behind the way Sandra Rilova folds a whole fairy tale into one picture.

11:30 am

At the Desk

Then the office, and this is the picture that got us. A man folds over his laptop, and his red cardigan drains to grey from the waist down, as if the chair were pulling the color out of him.

There’s a mug, a desk lamp, and a little heart on the laptop lid. That’s heart number two, and it’s barely hanging on.

The genie is less friendly. A long orange spirit pours out of a laptop as a ribbon of ones and zeros and glares down at the man who opened it, who has leaned so far back in his chair he’s about to tip over. We’ll let you decide which piece of software he’s meant to be.

And then lunch. An ironworker in a hard hat eats an apple on a steel beam high over the city, the old way, while a golden robot the size of a building sits beside him with its hands folded in its lap. The robot is smiling with its eyes closed. The worker looks up at it like a new coworker he hasn’t figured out yet. It starts as a picture about machines taking jobs and somehow ends up as a picture about company, which is why it’s our favorite of the sixteen.

The workday ends with a handoff. A young man and an older one, both in white vests, pass a wrench across a field of purple, their arms so long they nearly tie in a knot. A whole apprenticeship in two colors and one tool.

6:15 pm

Other People

Evenings are for other people, and Jońca is very good at how strange they are up close.

A man leans in toward a woman, and her enormous white sunglasses reflect him back at himself, twice. He’s talking to her. He’s mostly looking at himself.

Now put these two side by side. One woman keeps the people in her life inside a lampshade where her head should be, small men glowing on its walls. The other carries hers on the outside: a man hugging his knees on top of her head, another riding her shoulder, a little one tucked into her coat, a bird in her hair and a cat at her back. She’s smiling. Same idea, two very different evenings.

9:00 pm

Going Up

Ambition gets two pictures, and they argue with each other. In one, a woman in polka dots and blue heels pole vaults across an orange page, handbag still on her shoulder, the pole bending into one long yellow arc. She isn’t stopping to change shoes. In the other, a man has climbed all the way up to a red treehouse and crouches in the doorway, staring back down the ladder. Partway down, the rungs have buckled. He made it, and now he has to figure out the way back.

2:00 am

After Dark

Late at night the pictures get stranger and the crayon gets thicker. A man sits in an armchair at the far end of a round room, seen through an open vault door, facing a small orange frame on a bare cream wall. We don’t know what’s in the frame. We’re not sure he does either.

Then the heart maze. Two pale figures walk hand in hand along narrow ridges between deep, heart-shaped pits, the whole landscape scribbled in orange crayon. Look down into the pit on the left and there’s one tiny blue light at the bottom. That’s heart number three, or the whole field is, depending on how you count.

And the last thought of the day. A hollow head holds a pile of grey spheres and one glowing orange one. Anyone who has been awake at 2am knows exactly which one that is.

Did You Catch These?

Jońca leaves small rewards for anyone who looks twice. Here are eight we found on our second and third passes. Tap one to go back to its picture.

Who Draws Like This

Jońca studied architecture, and you can feel it in how these pictures are built: a few big volumes, one clear ground, nothing on the page that isn’t carrying weight. He finished his degree, decided architecture wasn’t for him, and spent years designing websites, banner ads and storyboards. His break came at a meeting about a website. He brought along a portfolio of drawings, the trade magazine Media i Marketing Polska liked those more than the web work, and he ended up illustrating for them for several years.

Polish magazines followed, including Przekrój, Wprost, Newsweek Polska and Zwierciadło, then clients abroad like Apple, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, New Scientist and The Hollywood Reporter. Along the way he collected a shelf of Polish design awards, among them several Chimeras for magazine illustration and gold from KTR, the Polish advertising creatives’ club. He’d sit comfortably in our guide to extraordinary paintings and illustrations.

Two details from Polish profiles of him made us like him even more. His studio is in his family home, so his commute is two flights of stairs. And he says he works fastest first thing in the morning, when fifteen minutes can do what took three hours the night before, but does most of his work in the evening anyway. Which is exactly the kind of thing he’d draw.

He has also said his favorite moment is looking at a finished picture and knowing for certain that nothing could be added, taken away or moved. Scroll back up to the man in the bowler hat and you can see what he means.

If one of these pictures has followed you down the page, you can take it home. Jońca sells his illustrations as posters in his own shop, along with a printed wall calendar every year, and in Poland those calendars have something of a cult following. A whole year of these on the kitchen wall sounds pretty good to us. Go look!

Via Inspiration Grid. See more of Paweł Jońca’s work on Behance and Instagram. All illustrations © Paweł Jońca.

By Moss & Fog Staff