References

Into the blue, that awakens a mood in me that has a lot to do with daring, cockiness, uncertainty and a sense of adventure. The theatre group Daktylus around Stefan Weßeling and Anne Zühlke has, despite Corona and certainly also with the conflicting emotional states during the standstill of the last few years, animated its choir and acting members to create characters, stories and fantasies that tell something like dream worlds and poetic commentaries on our tricky existence.

To pour such a cocktail of different fantasies into a form and to create a book like Into the Blue, you need a stylish handwriting for the visual side of the whole, the magic of the illustrations. Vanessa Gärtner manages to give the diverse stories their own face with her bright pale blue watercolour tones and the clear graphic outlines of individual figures and scenes. Always wider, always different and yet clearly contoured, her sketches and illustrations lead Into the Blue – into A Poetic Spectacle – a bold experiment worth seeing.

Working with Vanessa means: curiosity-awakening, inspiring conversations. From this she conjures up her idiosyncratic images and stage elements with skill, playful ease and humour. No idea how she does it. Our productions ANYWHERE and INTO THE BLUE…! are inseparable from her clever mind and excellent creative will.

A successful symbiosis between text and image takes place when an illustration goes beyond the purely explanatory aspect of a text, when a new space is opened in the consciousness of the viewer. Vanessa Gärtner’s illustrations open up this space. Her relaxed painting style and sense of humour serve as the key.

The association Kulturhilfswerk e. V. has been working with Vanessa Gärtner for many years. What we appreciate about her illustrations for posters is her good intuition and sensitivity for the content to be conveyed in relation to the target group to be addressed. Her illustrations are always characterised by her very own handwriting, her personal expression.