25. September 2025
What’s in an illustration
When I work for clients my ideas are triggered by their needs, of course. Newspapers or magazines send me the text they need an illustration for, ‘La Promesse’ needed a certain kind of visual language…
But every once in a while a real situation sparks an idea that leads to a personal piece of work, like this Valentine’s day illustration.
I used to do a one-hour course in creating and crafting with the elementary school kids here in our village. Depending on the group of children that came together at any given moment, these courses could be lovely or demanding… or both. We had one little girl that was especially… shall we say…lively. Imagine a little prototype for THE italian Mama, including loud voice, gesture, attention span, a way of keeping everybody around her in check, and you pretty much get the picture. I’ll call here Maria, keeping her real name secret, of course.
One day, completely out of the blue, Maria announced ‘I have been in a hospital three times!’. All the other little girls looked awe-stricken.
Noticing my dubious look she added ‘For my birth.’ Not expecting me to have had any similarly interesting experiences she asked ‘Have you been in a hospital, Mrs. Freund?’
‘Yes, my heart needed to be repaired’, I answered. And before I could even start to explain, Maria, full of sympathy cut in ‘Uuuh, Mrs. Freund! Was your heart so broken it needed to be repaired?!’
And there you have it. What becomes of the broken-hearted? They go to hospital. To have their hearts repaired.
‘La Promesse’ is out now !
It’s finally here !
Ten months of very intensive work went into this beautiful book.
The author Marie De Lattre and I have known each other for many years, having gone to graphic design school together. We loosely stayed in touch for twenty years, keeping track of what the other one was doing from afar.
The scriptwriter, Nicolas Buysse and Marie have known each other since childhood, so we came together as a team really easily.
Marie has written the story of her grandparents, eastern european jews who came to France in the 1920s and were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Their son, Maries father, survived, hidden by friends and strangers alike.
We have all read stories about the Holocaust. They touch us, make us angry, leave us at a loss about how humanity and basic human kindness can be lost at such an extend.
But when we read a book we can close it and leave it for an hour or a day when it gets too hard to read.
The deadline was such that I had no such time to spare. I worked every day, litterally, for ten months. No day off, no Sundays, no holidays. And the story bled into my life in a way I had never expected. By August I burst into tears everywhere, at the supermarket, at the bakery… The characters of the book had become so real to me they seemed like family.
Fortunately this is also a story about hope and about unflinching love and kindness. It’s a story about those who survived and it’s a story that wants to remind us to look closely at what is happening in the world right now.
‘Never be a bystander’ says the Holocaust survivor Irene Butter.
And so it is with pride and hope that we present ‘La Promesse’ - hoping that it touches many as it has touched us and that it may contribute to our collective memory, so necessary to guide us on our path through the present.
