Layers of Light and Hope: An Interview with Britta Teckentrup
Britta Teckentrup was born in Hamburg in Germany, and grew up in Wuppertal, near Cologne, a city known for its museum (the Von der Heydt, with works by impressionists and Dutch masters) and its sculpture garden (the Waldfrieden, with large modern works). At 18, in 1988, she came to the UK to study, first at Harrow College of Higher Education. With a new book, The Green Child out now, she talked to Nicolette Jones for Books for Keeps.
‘I always thought I wanted to study fine art, but when I was 18, I didn’t have the confidence. I thought I didn’t have enough to say. German universities were very intellectual and I wasn’t that intellectual. I worked in a different way. That’s when I first thought I’d come to England and do a foundation course with a bit of everything, a bit of painting, a bit of sculpture, a bit of illustration. Then I realized that I really liked illustration. So I went on to study illustration at St Martin’s School of Art.’
‘But the idea that I wanted to do fine art never left me.’ Her next course was Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College, where her favourite teacher was Helen Chadwick. On the way, she also spent three months on an exchange in Dublin.
After her master’s degree she worked in fine art and illustration separately. ‘At some point, they came together. I was doing books for some publishers that were more arty, and that was fine.’ In all, she spent seventeen years in London and Surrey, before moving back with her family in 2005 to Berlin, where her Scottish husband had always dreamed of living. She was in her Berlin flat, lined with face-out books, when I spoke to her on Zoom.
She attributes her publishing debut to ‘pure luck’ at the degree show at St Martins. Sue Tarsky, children’s publisher, who had an eye for talent (she also discovered Sara Fanelli, and published Helen Craig’s Angelina Ballerina books) and commissioned Teckentrup’s first book in 1992.
After her second, Tarsky asked ‘Can you write as well?’ ‘And I said, “No, I can’t.” But then she said, “Try”, and that’s when the writing started. So I’m very thankful to her. That was my way in.’
Teckentrup has now published some 70 books, of which the latest, her first for Post Wave, is The Green Child, whose rhyming text by 
Hollie Hughes features a fairy-like green child with a message to mankind about climate change, and the hope that children can make a difference. Teckentrup’s images turn this alarm call into a celebration of nature through the seasons.
The text tells us that the planet is overheating and needs help, but the illustrations are not scary. They bypass the blasted landscapes and the bushfires. ‘I really wanted to avoid an image of the earth with factories and planes and cars everywhere and all of that. I wanted to stick to the seasons and show what we want to save. Animals and nature and the beauty of it. To instil an awe of nature in children and the parents who read it, so they love the planet and the woods and the green child so much that they feel that’s worth preserving.’
Getting The Green Child right to begin with was ‘almost half the process’. There were about ten different versions, beginning with Teckentrup’s characteristic autumnal palette. ‘My first approach was very Grimms’ fairy tale-like, in dark woods, and the green child was really simple with just a leaf emerging and looked really alien. But they thought, I think, that it was a bit too scary and dark. And they said, can you make it a bit brighter and a bit flowery? Then I tried more flowery things and something that looks a bit gender neutral. At first the face was green, but that changed too and I played around with making it a bit friendlier and a bit warmer and more approachable.’
The finished character has a tall hat covered in blooms on a pointy head, and is reminiscent of a Flower Fairy with rather different proportions. ‘I quite like the fact that the head is so huge. But then I thought nature is more important than the child. And if the child represents nature, I guess that’s why I made it so big.’
In an early version, there was a possibility that the hat would also go through the seasons, turning from buds to flowers that wilt. But there was ‘too much happening in the image’ and ‘it didn’t work out.’
I suggest to Teckentrup that the child whose hat is always flowery is a symbol of the spring always being there. The child becomes a symbol of hope because it is wearing a spring-like hat. ‘Yes’, she says, ‘that’s exactly the reason why it works like that’.
Teckentrup is happy to accommodate changes. She enjoys working with publishers to arrive at what they want. She was astonished, she says, to discover that German publishers don’t have art directors. They have editors, whose comments tend to be less about the visual aspects of picturebooks. She was apprehensive about how that would work without the expert input. But today she works with a couple of German editors she trusts. Now and then, she admits, she enjoys the greater freedom they give her. Her favourite book, The Swing, published by Prestel, a beautiful and epic work about time passing and nature and community, was an example of exercising this freedom.
Although her many books have ranged in style from the brighter and more minimal to the darker and more detailed, her characteristic technique is this. ‘Every couple of months I’ve got mad texture-making days where I mainly use oil paint and newsprint, because I like the way the oil paint seeps through. The back is sometimes more interesting than the front side, and you get lots of lucky mistakes. Then I pile up those textures and scan them in. In my first books, before computers, I cut out all the textures and used collage. Now I put textured papers in different Photoshop layers on top of each other. Sometimes a Photoshop file can be two or three hundred different layers. The way the textures interact with each other sometimes makes me see things. When I start a spread I don’t know what I’m going to do. Publishers sometimes despair that I can’t give them roughs because things develop while I play around with those textures and see what works.’
We wonder where her interest in textures originates. She often takes photos of textures in nature, not to use in her books, but just because she likes them. Then she remembers that ‘When I was a kid, I had this horrible 70s wallpaper made from cork. The ugliest you can imagine. It was a black background and then there were cork patterns on top. I remember lying in bed and just seeing things in those patterns like faces and figures. I do wonder if that made me be so fascinated by textures. I think it might have. Saying that now, it’s still very much the way I work with my textures in my picturebooks.’
Teckentrup is also fascinated by the effects of light, and moonlight and shafts of brightness are often a striking element of her work despite her predilection for darkness. ‘I think darkness carries more emotion. There is something inside of me that relates to the darker image and you can play with light more when it’s dark. Light is really, really important to me, and it quite often comes last. Once I’ve added that light aspect towards the end, then the emotions come. When I do that layer more than anything in an illustration it shows what I feel inside. Then it’s not so much about the technique or if the child or the room looks right. Then it’s purely about depth and being real and it’s almost the most vulnerable and honest part of creating the picture, the light. It’s quite intuitive, so I probably can’t explain it in a better way.’
The ideal way to work, for Teckentrup, is on several books at once. With her two German publishers and her array of English ones she often has the opportunity. She has current and forthcoming projects with Prestel, Nosy Crow, Big Picture Press and Walker, among others, ranging from books for the very young to projects for older children that will enable her to exercise her love of darkness. We look forward, as she does, to seeing how they turn out in the uncertain process of creation.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Inspire Me! (Nosy Crow), illustrated by Axel Scheffler.
Books mentioned:
The Green Child, Hollie Hughes, illus. Britta Teckentrup, Post Wave Children’s Books, 9781836270577, 32pp, £12.99 hbk.
The Swing, Britta Teckentrup, Prestel, 9783791375366, 160pp, £19.99 hbk.
