25. September 2025

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.