Santiago Bellido Blanco is a former student of the Saint Augustine High School of the Augustinian Recollects in Valladolid who, when he was 15 years old, presented his first complete comic, dedicated to the life of Saint Augustine of Hippo.
Today, professionally dedicated to university teaching of Architecture and Design, he exploits his love of drawing and painting in multiple activities: caricaturing, book and magazine illustration, posters, murals, paintings…
With the Augustinian-Recollect Family, he has already created multiple covers for the alumni magazine of his school or the internal bulletin OAR Al Habla, a school calendar, the illustrations for the book The Tree that Augustine Planted, caricatures of Mariana de San José or Jenaro Fernández, biographical vignettes of Saint Ezekiel Moreno and the martyrs of Japan, or large paintings such as those of the conversion of Saint Augustine, the Recollect African mission of Sierra Leone, the three Japanese Augustinian Recollect martyrs, Saint Ezekiel Moreno missionary or the five Chinese Recollect martyrs.
Santiago also visited his former school on numerous occasions, among other reasons to organize comic book workshops with students together with another colleague, a professor at the European University Miguel de Cervantes, with whom he is developing a study on the impact of comics on the dissemination of cultural heritage among young people.
The latest project carried out with the Augustinian Recollect Family and unveiled in their former school is a huge realistic mural that, in the renovated reception area of the educational center, represents the entire task of integral education carried out from the Augustinian Recollect ideology with its identifying characteristics of community, search for knowledge and solidarity service.
The mural features some of the infrastructure of the Valladolid educational complex, such as the Sports Centre, the most recognizable exterior facade visible from the natural exit to the Castilian-Leonese city towards Madrid, the collegiate chapel and the great temple of Our Lady of Consolation with its central cubist image of this traditional Marian devotion throughout the Augustinian Family.
The students, whose faces are real (in fact, they have given their permission to be portrayed) are always in a group, in community, and carrying out any of those many tasks that attend to their education: sports, study reflected in observation, reading and writing, spirituality with prayer, the strengthening of evangelical values (well symbolized in a hug) or singing and praise (with the choir immortalized).
The mural reinforces the value of the “educational community”, because although only students appear, everything they do would be impossible without the participation of a religious community, the center’s management team, its teachers and non-teaching staff, tutors and parents.
Much more than going to class and completing a curriculum of subjects and exams, the students of Saint Augustine High School learn values, sociability, solidarity, teamwork, they better understand the world around them, they value their inherited cultural heritage by opening themselves up to other worlds, cultures and knowledge; they will have an adult life in which they will know how to have their own criteria, dialogue and make conscious and healthy decisions.
More than just a place of learning, the mural shows that Saint Augustine School creates spaces for meeting, participation, and mutual support; and that each member of its educational community is called to build and maintain happy life projects with a future.
