Marie Wolf / How Illustration changed my life

Since I can remember, there have been two things in my life that have fascinated me and filled me with happiness: illustration and animals. There are countless childhood photographs of me in which I am either holding a pen or an animal in my hands, always with a smile on my face.

I grew up in East Germany in the 1990s, my parents worked in technical professions, but they were always deeply interested in culture. When I think of my childhood, so many moments come to mind in which I was holding a pen. I still remember, for example, keeping a travel journal together with my mom – a small squared notebook – when we travelled through Greece in our old VW bus during the summer before I started school. She wrote down the story of Hercules or the Minotaur, I illustrated it with my coloured pencils. I remember us picking up hitchhikers in our bus who, in exchange for the free ride, would sit with me at the little table in the camper and draw while my father was driving and my mother turned over the Dire Straits cassette. I remember sitting in my purple child’s room, covering my desk lamp with gauze so I could secretly keep drawing late at night while the adults were sitting in the kitchen. I remember my parents putting a whiteboard in my room so I would not spend the whole day sitting at my desk. I remember spending hours outside with my grandfather, drawing a small stream while the grass smelled so fresh and the old camping chairs so familiar musty. I also remember later making countless tiny little books with a friend and collecting them in a shoebox, which we called our library and took with us to school every day so we could lend the little books to our classmates. But the other children in my class began to make fun of it. They thought it was childish, they laughed at me. I was no longer happy with my pictures, found them embarrassing. Drawing and painting became less present in my life, as it probably does for many children.

When I was fifteen, I began psychotherapy. The diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder. A few months earlier, I had lost a close family member in a tragic accident. I was not doing well, I felt ungrounded. During the time of therapy, I often felt like an outsider, as though my mental health were a flaw. Unfortunately, back then, in the early 2000s, it was still far from normal to speak openly about mental health. My favourite subject at the time was art class: I could lose myself in an image for hours, and I felt how drawing calmed me, how my thoughts stopped circling. My art teacher was also my literature teacher, and I quickly realised how much I loved interpreting texts. Finding connections to history, literature, science… and discovering new relationships through them, became a real driving force for me. I realised that metaphors do not only work through words, but that I could also create them visually, and I began interpreting texts through visual metaphors. The moment I understood that this could actually become a profession, I knew: this is what I want to do. My therapist suggested that I draw more and exchange ideas with others through it. So I began taking an art course at the municipal art school, learned analogue photography, went to workshops and found friends with the same interests. It helped me enormously, gave me stability, filled my life, and gave me a goal after a long period without direction: I wanted to make this my profession. Suddenly I had something to work towards, and I received encouragement from others. When I was able to begin my design studies in Berlin at the age of nineteen, as one of the youngest students in my semester, I was incredibly proud. I studied illustration for the first semester because I enjoyed interpreting texts through my images and creating visual worlds, but afterwards I wanted to devote myself to classical design. With the support of my professors, friends, and family, I found the courage to show my illustrated bachelor’s work to a renowned German publishing house, which published it a year after I graduated. When my first book was released by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 2015, I could not help but think back to my very first steps as an illustrator: the shoebox with my library that I carried to school every day.

To this day, spending time with animals and drawing makes me incredibly happy. Endorphins rush through my body when I hold a pen in my hand, I feel in harmony with myself. Even though it has long since become much more than a hobby, it often does not feel like work at all, only the deadlines remind me that it is. To me, it is a true privilege to be able to spend so much of my life drawing, constantly immersing myself in new subjects, inventing worlds, and conveying messages. My profession is incredibly diverse, every day I learn so much about politics, business, society, art, literature… and each time, I disappear down a rabbit hole and only re-emerge days or weeks later, full of new insights, while the pen in my hand has been visualising them all along. In a small way, illustrating still feels a bit like therapy to me: through it I always find my way back to myself

To this day, spending time with animals and drawing makes me incredibly happy. Endorphins rush through my body when I hold a pen in my hand, I feel in harmony with myself. Even though it has long since become much more than a hobby, it often does not feel like work at all, only the deadlines remind me that it is. To me, it is a true privilege to be able to spend so much of my life drawing, constantly immersing myself in new subjects, inventing worlds, and conveying messages. My profession is incredibly diverse, every day I learn so much about politics, business, society, art, literature… and each time, I disappear down a rabbit hole and only re-emerge days or weeks later, full of new insights, while the pen in my hand has been visualising them all along. In a small way, illustrating still feels a bit like therapy to me: through it, I always find my way back to myself.