An interview with trauma illustrator Lara Schmelzeisen.
Hi Lara, would you please introduce yourself?
Like. I work as an illustrator in idyllic Heidelberg, Germany, here I have been living with my family between the Neckar River and the forest in a cohabitation project for 5 years.
My studio is a small green construction trailer, here I work on drawing assignments such as the illustrations for Ybe's book, but also on other things, for example at the moment I am working on a little assignment for the theater in Mannheim, where I will illustrate a stage discussion live; it is called Graphic Recording.
Much of my work can be found at www.kontur.be - even though there is less and less to be found in Dutch, my mother tongue, it still gives a good idea of what I do. Ybe, who is my mother and therefore knows me quite well, once called me a creative jack-of-all-trades. I still find that a nice compliment.
You paint a lot by hand, why this choice of such a rather old-fashioned way of working?
Gosh, it's a way of working that makes me happy. With the brush, with paint stains and pencil marks, that is so much more real than when I make the same brush mark appear with a mouse click on a laptop screen.
I love the simplicity that goes into it and the definitiveness; the brush stroke is either sitting or not. Endlessly at a screen making the perfect stroke, I have no use for that, it is precisely the non-perfect, the edge off, the ink blot and the out of control experiment, that I enjoy so much. Not only in drawings, also in people 🙂
Then again we have arrived at illustrations around trauma: it would be absurd if they were perfect! Just as people with scratches on their souls are beautiful, drawings with a crazy ink stain can also be beautiful.
I hate powerpoint diagrams, which tell us that something is only serious and scientifically based if it also looks primal and perfect. Presenting complex things and difficult topics in an informative and beautiful way is what I like to achieve.
Can you tell us more about how you get started when you begin such an assignment?
I usually work in multiple loops, ping-ponging ideas back and forth with the client.
With Ybe it's completely different, that's how it feels anyway. After five years of working together on trauma illustrations and of course also because of our mother-daughter relationship, I understand faster than usual what is needed. This is a very natural, cocreative way of working, which I find difficult to explain.
In the last five years our common visual vocabulary has grown tremendously. When I ask "does that feel like the wave or is it more like a gap?" Ybe knows what I mean, which is very helpful. Consequently, my role in developing new things has become less and less creative and more ensuring coherence and consistency in that visual world we have created together.
Why do you keep liking this?
I am learning so much, still learning. I can only illustrate something if I have also understood it, and so I learn something with every assignment. My friends sometimes already consider me a trauma expert because working with Ybe means that I deal with that topic so much. I can well understand Ybe's passion for trauma: so much of what makes us human is hidden there.
