Drawings
Drawing has always held a central place in the work of Victoria Dael. It is a language that allows her to speak faster than painting, with more immediacy and honesty — to capture movement, mood, and the breath of a moment.
Since 2016, Victoria has created drawing series inspired by cities and people: from the expressive, dramatic lines of Toreadors to the light Paris sketches, where life flows in the rhythm of streets, cafés, and quick gestures.
She loves fast drawing, where the hand moves ahead of the thought and the line becomes a character of its own. These works preserve the impulse of the moment: a subtle turn of the head, a silhouette caught in motion, a glance that disappears the second you blink.
In recent years, her practice has expanded to include digital drawings, yet even here Victoria maintains the feeling of hand-drawn work — the vibration of a pencil, soft transitions, and the spontaneity of lines. Even on a screen, her drawings appear as if they were made on paper, carrying warmth, texture, and a living breath.
This section presents drawings from different years: quick sketches, narrative series, city studies, and new works created in Andalusia. All of them are united by one thing — an attention to people, gestures, emotion, and the fleeting moment that is so easy to lose.
Silent Toreros
This series was born not from spectacle, but from pause.
I was never interested in bullfighting as an event. What matters to me is what surrounds it: waiting, the silence before stepping out, the tilt of a head, the line of a back, the weight of a costume on the shoulders. Those brief moments when a person is left alone with themselves.
Here, toreros exist outside the arena and beyond the audience.
They are not heroes of action, but figures of inner state. Their faces are often hidden, their movements restrained, their bodies seem to dissolve into ornament. They feel more like shadows than performers.
I see them as people gathered inward.
There is no gesture of victory in these works. There is inner silence, concentration, vulnerability. There is the moment before and after. That fragile interval where breathing is louder than applause.
The works are created in digital pencil and sepia.
This restrained tone holds the figures within a single space of quiet, softens movement, and makes pauses more visible. In it, costumes lose their shine, faces slip into shadow, and only the human being inside the ritual remains.
“Silent Toreros” is a series about human fragility hidden within ritual.
About the beauty of restrained gesture.
About silence inside movement
Watson
This series of drawings is my visual diary of life with Watson. It began after our move from Ukraine to Andalusia and grew naturally out of everyday moments: morning walks, quiet afternoons, play, rest, small discoveries, and shared silence. Watson became my companion in a new country and, in many ways, my guide back to drawing. These are not portraits in the traditional sense. They are fragments of time, observations of movement and mood, traces of light on fur, paws on warm tiles, wind across the hills, and the simple presence of a dog who teaches you how to slow down. Through Watson, I rediscovered rhythm, daily routine, and joy in small things.
This series is about trust, adaptation, and creative rebirth.
About finding home again.
And about how a dog can quietly change your life.
Stories About Dogs
These drawings grow out of real stories, bonds, and love for a particular animal. Each portrait begins with photographs and the owners’ words, then becomes a quiet dialogue between me and the dog’s character.
It matters to me not only to capture likeness, but to sense mood, gaze, gesture, that special state that makes every dog unique. I work with line, light, and pauses, trying to preserve a feeling of living presence, as if the dog has just lifted its head or is about to take a breath.
Many of these works are created as gifts, memorial portraits, or family keepsakes. For some, they are a way to hold on to memories. For others, a way to celebrate a friendship that has lasted for years. Each portrait is a meeting for me.
A brief moment of closeness with another life, translated into the language of drawing.
Paris in the 1930s
Part One of the series “Parisian Stories”
This part of the series was created while I was working on my diploma project based on Remarque’s novel Arch of Triumph. As a production designer, it is important not only to recreate an era, but to feel its breath: the rhythm of the streets, the character of the people, the physical presence of the city.
While preparing, I gathered material about Paris in the 1930s, studying photographs, archives, and film footage, trying to understand not the outer appearance of the time, but its inner atmosphere. I was interested in everyday city life: how people sat in cafes, walked along the embankments, crossed bridges, how the streets and squares looked, and what kind of moods filled the air.
These drawings are not illustrations of the novel. They are an independent artistic exploration of the environment in which Remarque’s characters might have lived. Here, Paris is not a backdrop, but a living space of human destinies. The city becomes the setting for simple moments of daily life: meetings, waiting, solitude, and brief pauses within the constant movement of life.
It was with this series that my “Paris Stories”
began, as an attempt to hear the voice of time and
translate it into the language of drawing.
Parisians
Part Two of the series “Parisian Stories”
In the second part of the series, my focus shifts to the people of Paris. These are collective images born from different times and personal observation. Here, characters from the eras I studied as a film artist meet people from contemporary Paris, whom I observed firsthand while walking through the city.
I am not interested in portrait likeness, but in character, gesture, posture, and inner state. The Parisians in these drawings are not heroes of specific stories, but carriers of the city’s atmosphere. Each of them lives a simple life: walking along the street, carrying a baguette, sitting in a cafe, playing the accordion, rushing somewhere, or pausing for a brief moment amid the urban noise.
These figures form a single flow, like the movement of Parisian streets, where past and present exist at the same time. It was important for me to show a person as part of the urban environment and at the same time as a separate world, with their own memory, mood, and inner quiet.
“Parisians” is my attempt to hear the human voice of the city and translate it through line, light, and the pause between strokes.
Paris of the Mid-19th Century
Part Three of the series “Parisian Stories”
This part of the series is dedicated to Paris in the mid-19th century. The drawings were created while I was working on a project inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s writing.
As before, my goal was not to illustrate a specific story, but to immerse myself in the atmosphere of the era. I explored the city through historical materials, engravings, and archival images, trying to sense how Paris once lived, breathed, and moved.
Here, the riverbanks, boats, bridges, working quarters, and quiet streets form a fragile landscape of another time. People appear as silhouettes within this space, part of the rhythm of the city. Labor, water, stone, and light come together to shape a Paris that feels distant, yet strangely familiar.
These works reflect my search for the inner tone of the 19th-century city. Paris reveals itself as a place of contrasts, shadow and light, silence and motion. It is a city in transformation, where everyday life unfolds alongside history, and where the past still echoes in the present.
This chapter of “Paris Stories” is my attempt to enter that earlier Paris and translate its atmosphere into a language of lines, textures, and quiet observation.
Parisian Beauties
Part Four of the series “Parisian Stories”
This part of the series is dedicated to the women of Paris. Women beyond a specific time, yet carrying the clear breath of an era.
In these images, echoes of Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Degas.
I am interested not so much in outward beauty as in inner state, freedom, gesture, the line of the body, and the mood of the moment. These are women of cafes and streets, dancers and dreamers, tired and daring, fragile and strong at once. Each of them lives her own small story, filled with waiting, solitude, passion, or quiet joy.
There is a gentle sense of theatricality here, a feeling of stage and pause, as if the viewer has accidentally stepped close and glimpsed a fragment of someone else’s life. These heroines do not pose, they simply exist in their own space, allowing the gaze to linger.
“Parisian Beauties” became for me a reflection on femininity as a language. On the body as a line. On mood as form. It is my dialogue with an era and with that image of Paris where woman has always been part of its mystery and attraction.
