Part of this is I'm trying to figure out some of the big picture things. How aesthetically to tell your story and even before that kind of what your story is, you know? I've been thinking about how we would create the documentary. And in my general state of anxiety right now, I came to this question, is this about me or is this by me?
And you don't even see me drawing, right? We don't. We're just saying the top half of your head. So you can act with your eyes.
When I design the experience for the viewer, of course I want to come across as good as I possibly can, because we're vain and we have to be. And if it's about me, it's a little bit this tug-of-war of how much do you make me reveal and how much do I reveal of stuff that I might not want to reveal. But ultimately, it's not about me.
Be an artist. I would say everything that happens between nine and six is about work. I work mostly by myself.
So I sit at my desk and I draw and I design. So I'm there and it's me and my art supplies and my computer and my coffee maker. So it's kind of me, me, me.
I'm such a control freak that I would always love to sit down and come up with the perfect formula for creating art, but it doesn't work that way. It's a little bit of a painful realization because ultimately it really it is to a very large degree staring at paper and I have to trust for kind of crazy moments to happen. I would say that abstraction is for me the most important concept of art.
Where you say, oh, I'm just drawing a simple box because I love things that are not precious. But it's the idea of like, I start with a thousand different thoughts and then I one by one throw them all out until at the end I have like the one or two or three that are essential to the whole question. The abstraction for me is this idea of getting rid of everything that's not essential to making a point. This thing here, it's called the good shape or the good form. So I take this flat iron shape and I start doing things out of that.
Men, women, bathroom, strong men, nuclear power plant, cowboys and Indians, all sorts of sports. So what did your teachers make of you? I had a very, very... Difficult teacher Heinz Edelmann who did Yellow Submarine, the Beatles movie, and did amazing posters and book work. Fantastic designer, but let's say he did not teach by encouragement.
The highest compliment that you could hope for was, oh, we don't really have a problem with that. It was like, yes! When I grew up in southwestern Germany, I was always drawing. It was all about getting action and proportion right, drawing things very dynamic.
And that was the goal, to kind of get there to this hyper-realist, amazing painting. And this is kind of the notion that I went to art school with. With the teacher I had in art school, Mr. Edelman, he made it pretty clear that he really disliked the stuff that I was doing. drawing like hundreds of sketches on just like a letter-sized paper. And then each week he would come in and he would go through them and basically like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh, this one's okay. This is what we did in school. Take a topic like a red clown's nose and then just squeeze the hell out of it. Just do every single variation. Eventually I realized that it's not...
It's not about something super simple like a black square or like one line. But each idea requires a very specific amount of information. Sometimes it's a lot, a lot of details, a lot of realism.
Sometimes it's really just like this one line, the one pixel. But each idea has one moment on that scale. So let's say you want to illustrate the idea of a heart as a symbol for love.
When you illustrate it as just like a... Red Square, which is the ultimate abstraction of a heart. Nobody knows what you're talking about, so it totally falls flat. When you go all the way realistic and draw an actual heart made out of flesh and blood and pumping, it's just so disgusting that the last thing anybody would ever think about is love. And somewhere between that abstract Red Square and the real kind of butcher heart is the graphic shape that kind of looks like that and kind of looks like that.
And it's just right to... transport this idea of a symbol for love. New Yorker covers are the biggest deal for an illustrator, I think. Like once you see the New Yorker cover, once you see the history, you see the artists, you see most importantly, I guess, the cultural impact.
This was the first one. What was the date? July 9th, 2001, the day I got married. Which is especially fantastic. What I love is that this is what they put on the magazine.
So there's no headline. There's not even a story in this was July 4th 2001 and it was about the missile shield the Doctor Strange Lovey and generals who start World War 3 there's no story about this idea inside the magazine so it's almost like the stage is pulled empty and this is the image for one week. The second cover might actually have been this one. And to a strange degree this might even be the most exciting one because the first cover of The New Yorker is Eustace Tilley, this New York dandy with the top hat. And we said, let's try to do an icon of an icon.
Making the butterfly just a blue square makes absolutely no sense unless you have a blue-colored background. unless you know the original. I've done 22, I think. The thing is, I never even thought about 22. You think that when you've done two or three, all of a sudden it becomes like, oh, it's just another job.
It's not. Because it's extremely exciting, but it never becomes easy. So tell me about this New Yorker cover you're working on. I'm doing this virtual reality cover which it's more like augmented reality.
So the idea is I have this magazine open on the front or on the back now I approach it with my my phone or with my tablet and then this whole three-dimensional animation comes out. It's like no way to win like this is a lot of levels of metaphors and drawing to work and like 3D and 2D and back and forth so it's kind of physical. And I also knew I couldn't plan.
I couldn't have one idea that just solves the entire thing. So I had to start somewhere and then see, is this strong enough or flexible enough to just go to the next step? So the magazine, in theory, opened like that. But I don't look like a magazine like that.
I think nobody ever looks at a magazine like that. So I thought, when I have a magazine, I might look at it like that. So really seeing it as the inside-outside world.
I was thinking, what's a very New York inside-outside scene? I realized that a subway, I have the windows, I have people sitting in there, and then the whole subway can leave. Yeah, that's the idea of the magazine as the plane that the person walks through and you can see it from the inside or from the outside. It's a New York City cab, off-duty, which you can see. It's off-duty here.
This is, let's make it busy. This one's busy. Looks better though, all black and yellow.
My favorite colors. It's the restriction with LEGO, the restriction of just very low resolution. It's almost like a three-dimensional pixel drawing that I enjoy so much. Why have you done so much New York work? Well, it started with my connection.
It was the first city I went to by myself. I think there's only one city in your life that you go to by yourself, and you own that. There was no uncle, there was no parents that paved the way.
It was like my place. I moved to New York in 97. To my surprise, when I went there and showed my book, I realized that people understood 99% of my work. Going to a country that's a few thousand miles away and everybody gets everything is really amazing. In a very odd way I felt very much at home just being so immersed in American culture as a kid. From music to art, Magnum PI.
Staten Island Ferry. If you've been on the Staten Island Ferry, you know that this is it. This is the essence of this kind of first tourist moment.
For me, this style is based on culture, on shared experiences. This is more interesting than coming up with a visionary new way of speaking that people then have to decipher. There's this one Starbucks that I love, like sitting in that window, and it's been a place I've been sitting at from my very first time coming to New York.
And I always felt like, oh, that's where I want to sit and kind of look out. And I've a couple of times tried to work from there, because that's how I see myself, you know, like the artist being in touch with the city. And then we have this kind of emotional exchange, people walking by. It just doesn't work at all.
The impact on the work is zero. It's even actually confusing, and I can't really focus when I sit there. This is like the moment where I realize that my real life and my work life, they don't really mix. I see what you're saying.
I'm trying to kind of solve it from a visual storytelling point of view. I mean I guess the way I see some of these things it's almost like these very quick montages of very close shots you know and done very quickly just Getting through the day. It's ritual like um brushing your teeth.
I mean again we can try Yeah, like any idea of like a camera in our bathroom Makes you feel extremely uncomfortable Okay, I don't want that. And so we can do it, but it would be more like a painful thing, and I could not possibly imagine how I would ever want to see that myself. I'd much rather draw it than show it. When I started working, I worked mostly under a deadline. For the first 10 years...
If I would have to separate my business, it was 30% we need Christoph to make a nice drawing on this and that and 70% of like, oh no, something went terribly wrong, we have another 12 hours let's call that guy, he will make a somewhat unembarrassing solution that will save our butts for a deadline. And I love that, I love this kind of tension, especially in editorial. A lot of the calls I got was out of desperation.
So I think Chuck Close said, inspiration is for amateurs. Us professionals, we just go to work in the morning. The one thing I really love about that quote is it relieves you of a lot of pressure.
It's not about waiting for hours for this moment where inspiration strikes. It's just about showing up and getting started and then something amazing happens or it doesn't happen. All that matters is you enable the chance for something to happen. For that you have to sit at your desk and you have to draw and do and make decisions and hope for the best.
It's so scary when you have half an hour to do something. That of course, like creating a process that allows you to do unembarrassing stuff on command is like the only way you can survive. If you create an armor of craft around you.
The one thing that's dangerous about focusing on craft and working very hard is that it can keep you from asking the really relevant questions. I'm trying to get good at something. What is that thing that I'm trying to get good at?
The real thing? It's a subway track with the knobs on the side of the track. So I'm gonna put somebody standing there.
When you stand there in the middle of the night, because you missed the last G train, and you just look at the critters, your friends and your enemies at once. The yellow is the perfect New York color. It's the taxi cabs, it's the side of the subways.
The contrast is just so perfect. I met my wonderful wife. We got married and had kids. We have this routine of like waving at each other when she leaves and comes. So I guess it started with me.
And my wife, and then you have one kid, and then it's really, it's more like that. And then you have a second child, you think they're kind of like the first one because you're doing the same thing that you did with the first one. The second one just turns out totally different. But then the third one is more like that. I did a book based on the experience of riding the subway with the kids and how they just totally absorbed this idea.
And I think what they liked about the subway, what I like about the subway, is that in a strange way you're in this huge city. But it's the one thing where you're in control. Sometimes we're like that. Sometimes like this. I guess we hope to be like that more often.
That seems like a pretty realistic rendering of family life. I'm trying to come up with something for the New Yorker. I'm doing this virtual reality cover and basically this is something I've never done. In this case not only do you work 360 but you work 360 in all directions so you can look at it from all different angles. For anything decent I've ever done I distinctly remember being in a dense and grumpy mood.
Worse than that, I get suspicious when having too good of a time working, since I know that this doesn't bode well for the outcome. When you draw in two dimensions, you can cheat. You can just hide anything you don't like behind a wall.
And in this case, you can look behind the wall and you can see all the mess that's behind it. It's like an endless compromise. The elements are not this highly rendered 3D world, which I really detest visually. Where everything has highlights and everything feels like this smelly plastic. I want an ink drawing.
I want a flat ink drawing that you can walk. into and that kind of surrounds you. There's too many lines on that side. Just throw in something that you think you would regret and that's usually the most interesting part.
When all fails just put in some water towers. So it was a great trick. And this is so wrong with that dry brush. I wish I could rip out the rest of the painting and do more of that.
Obviously I'm playing around for the camera now. Done, done, done. Okay, next scene.
I'm convinced you always have to change direction while things are good. I was in my mid-thirties, was extremely busy, fulfilled, but exhausted. And I still think New York is the best place to work, but I feel it's not a good place to refill your kind of creative tank.
And I find it harder to reinvent. I sensed that the only way to grow required that I loosen up. And it was like in the mid-2000s.
My wife and I agreed that the only place that we could imagine to move to would be Berlin. I'm the sun of my heart, I swear, yes Today we'll be here, tomorrow there I'm the middle of the road We're in the wave Then you're my head What I want is you What do you want? You're mine You're mine You're mine You're mine You're mine There's all these kind of crazy galleries that do stuff that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever economically and it's just a totally different mindset.
Berlin makes it easy not to worry so much about the feasibility of an idea. So my most intense phase in terms of my work actually happened when I moved to Berlin. You are mine, you are mine That what I want is you You are mine In a perfect world in this documentary, and this probably will make you queasy, there would be a moment where there's a sense of unadulterated reality.
You know, just a glimpse. I would feel so completely out of place. It would be the farthest thing from me ever showing anybody how I brush my teeth.
When you show the real thing, you kill it. You actually make it impossible to then look at it. at these things in the abstract. It's like in Charlie Brown, you never see the grown-ups. You only hear these muffled voices.
And that's perfect. That's amazing. One moment you would zoom out and show these grown-ups, they could be designed perfectly, they could be written perfectly, but everything else would be crashing down.
So in a way, I feel like we already zoomed out and showed, even though I don't know if I'm a grown-up, but that's already far too big of a zoom out. if you go even further there. But so much of your daily routine and life inspires your work. It just seems like we should be able to see it.
Well, I guess, yeah. Okay, honestly, nobody wants authenticity. Authenticity is like changing your kid's diapers.
It's just like, it's a cute idea in the abstract, but the real deal is just... All I care about is what's happening on the page. Because I want people to really think about themselves. What went into creating the art.
But, you know, people wanted to see you in your real life. We can't just film you at your desk the whole documentary. Anything that's happening between 9 and 6 is kind of the essence.
But some stuff has to happen outside the studio. Like going to a museum. The Gateway Drug is not creating art, but experiencing art.
Having the whole world explained or even better turned upside down just by looking at a few strokes of oil paint on canvas. That's the greatest thrill I know. If experiencing art is so amazing How great must it be to actually make this stuff? And that's how they lure you into art school. Everything I do is kind of creating information, creating usually images that...
do something with what the viewer already knows. Really the idea of like their experience and my experience coming together and the images are the trigger. But the big, big problem with routine is that everything starts to look the same.
So I'm constantly... trying to reinvent how I approach image making, how I approach storytelling, because the audience changes all the time. I change all the time. At 12, I taught myself to juggle. At any given moment, there's one ball in the air.
And this is something that I hate so much, this idea of no control. This approach of not planning opens a new door. It's really, really hard, but it just leads to these magic moments. I started an Instagram project called Sunday Sketches.
In terms of the response I've got, they've been some of the better stuff I've been doing, but on the other hand they're the most useless thing I've ever done. There's almost zero control there. For professional work I need control because I need to be able to tweak, to adjust, to plan. These Sunday sketches, they're unplannable.
All the good ones just happen by me just staring at something. Like moving around the light and then all of a sudden there's a highlight or a shadow and then, oh, now there's something happening. You can't sketch that. I never was a reader because I never wanted to escape from anything.
I wanted my real life to be interesting. And then I read a book, The Invention of Slowness, I think is the title. It's about a guy who's so incredibly slow in his perception that he actually sees shadows moving.
It's a good fiction book, but the amazing thing that I remember from reading that book is, whenever I looked up from that book, I felt I had this view from the book in my real world. This book made my life more interesting. This is also in art something where you're not creating an artificial world. You're taking the things you know and then you break them down into little elements and I rearrange them and all of a sudden make a statement.
Not with a monster or a dragon, but with a pencil. I came from print media. You just felt like it's always going to be there, people always need images, and they always need to be drawn, and if you figure that out, you're set.
And then all of a sudden, it wasn't anymore. It was about web long-form pieces, it was about animation. Of course, it's our job to see, is there some relevant way that I can contribute to this new angle? So this is all of us, all the time. So this is an app I did over the last four years and I wanted to do something interactive.
But the big question is the moment I give too much decision making to the viewer of what can happen, often the viewer might have different ideas and you want to be surprised. That's the whole point of books is you want some surprise, you want something unexpected to happen. But here in my literary section, I have all these literature references, like Don Quixote and Kafka, Moby Dick, little Jane Austen, and Homer. And hopefully kids enjoy that scene as much as grown-ups.
Some people love it. And probably some people don't. And some people love it. And some people don't.
That's life. I'm wondering, it almost seems like, you know, the creator of... Your pieces and you as editor of your pieces are two different people. Yes. I need to be in control and I need to have a very clear sense of where I'm going and why something's working and not working.
On the other hand, I've also realized that being more free-spirited is necessary. I found that I need to develop these two personas separately, be a much more ruthless editor, and be a much more careless artist. This I find physically exhausting, but there's good stuff happening there. I take very specific time off for this kind of free creation because I know it's basically impossible to do under deadline.
Literally just sitting in front of a piece of paper and just doing stuff and being fearless, there's something there that I need to kind of go back and investigate further. Creatively, I'm extremely dependent on these sparks. And that only works with loosening up without an assignment, without deadline, with just kind of creating and not worrying so much about where the whole thing goes.
But I think it has never happened to me that I tried something new on a big deadline. And what's your deadline for the New Yorker? Two weeks.
It's just going to be insanity. Totally stressed out. I've seen a lot of VR stuff and it's always like, oh wow, this is so interesting. And then 25 seconds later, I completely lose interest.
And this is like the great challenge right now. This is not like a coy thing to say, oh, I don't believe I'm talented. This is real, like being absolutely painfully aware of how you're not good enough to do something on command. Your general notion is that doing something nice makes you more confident. With ideas I often find it's the opposite.
With every good idea you have, it actually becomes more difficult because it's so hard to then repeat. Of course you can't repeat. And this is where the pain comes in.
When I talk about not being good enough or being afraid that you're out of ideas, you measure yourself against a lucky moment. And this is like really really painful. You had this one spark three years ago, and then a client asked you to do it again. And you think how can I... I won the lottery then, how can you ask me to win the lottery?
Under pressure with a gun to my head. This is and this is something before I consciously thought about it I just realized oh god, I'm miserable. But when I realized that my fears threatened to take a toll on my work, I decided I had to deal with them.
Relax, don't be so hard on yourself. I actually totally disagree. You have to practice and become better.
Every athlete, every musician practices every day. Why should it be different for artists? I sometimes imagine what would happen if I had to face the 2006 version of myself in some sort of creative bar fight. Maybe I've lost some of my youthful spark, but I'm confident I would kick my butt.
The assignment was to do an augmented reality cover. In a way, we have that augmented reality cover, but this already is an augmented reality cover because you can look at the same scene from two sides. I'm inside the subway, so essentially what...
I do with the iPad, I do with the physical magazine. And the magazine is the door of the subway. So this is an extension of that rather than the other way around. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This magic moment, so different and so new, was like any other, until I met you, and then it happened, it took me by surprise, I knew that you felt it too. See it by the look in your eyes, sweeter than wine, softer than a summer's night, I hold you tight, this magic moment.
The idea of pop music is not to invent a new story, but to tell the same story again in a new and interesting way. We don't buy a new pop song and say, oh, there's somebody singing about love. Nobody else is there to do that until now.
People have been singing about love for 500 years. It's the idea of making it different that you feel, oh, I never actually until now, nobody has ever gotten it right. So different and so new, was like any other. I love the idea of bringing these familiar scenes back in, but just making them appear to be totally different and new and true. Took me by surprise, and you felt it by the look in your eyes.
In the best moments what happens is that design celebrates the world. When I look at a piece of art that references my fears, my anxieties, my hopes, I can say, oh, there was this one drawing that made me realize that I'm alive or that I love other people or that I'm afraid. It's looser than...
Softer than a summer's night So please, baby, so please Save the last dance for me My goal is to speak visuals like a pianist speaks piano. And like somebody controls the keys and can convey different ideas, different emotions through that language. I have to constantly babble to try to kind of refine the act of speaking.
Taking the world and putting it into images and conveying them. And for that I have to constantly produce. It's not done because the whole idea of being done is kind of the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve.