book—a whole lot. You can never tell, but I always know when it’s enough. When I’m in the studio and I start drawing I think, Ugh, I’ve drawn this before. I’m bored. And that’s always the time when I change stuff up. There’s usually a traumatic break where I’m like “I can’t draw this anymore!” and there’s two months of not drawing and being miserable. Then all of a sudden, new stuff emerges. What are you working on at the moment that you can talk about? I’ve been working on The Artist season three. It’s a whole different kind of way telling the story—and in a very old fashioned way a little bit. I don’t know… It has to be a smasher, haha. I feel that it has to be good. But it can also fail big time. So I’m really excited about it. I think maybe 1/3 is done already, and I hope I can reach the goal. I really want to make the book a bit bigger and the colors should be better. The whole look of it should just be a smash—maybe a bit like Drifter. But yeah, I don’t know if I can maintain that level I have in my head. Are there any projects you’d like to embark on, that you don’t have the time or money for at the moment? I mean, I would love to do a children’s book. That was never a thing I wanted to do—never ever actually. But the idea is growing on me, and I think since two or three weeks ago I’ve been thinking, It would be so nice to do a children’s book. It’s not like I’ve never had the time for it, but I hadn’t ever thought of it. Maybe that’s something
I will think about, even though I know nothing about what children are like. I would totally illustrate it for someone else too. It depends on the story. But I would also maybe like to draw my own story, if I come up with a good one, haha. What hurdles do you still see ahead of yourself? What do you still struggle with in the work that you make? At the moment I’m really lucky and happy because it’s been safe for a year or two, financially. So that’s not a hurdle anymore, thank god. But I think the biggest hurdle is just not repeating myself and boring people. It can happen with The Artist quickly. That’s why I change it up a lot, story-wise. But I think if I don’t recognize how I repeat myself, that would be a big terrible thing. That would be the biggest failure I think. At the moment I think I still realize, Okay this is enough for me, but also for the reader it must be enough. I feel it a little bit. But I think this is the biggest kind of struggle or fear that I have about my own work. Other than that, I often think maybe it’s time to be more political. Even though I don’t want to get political in my work—I feel like I wouldn’t be good at it—but looking at the world, sometimes it feels a bit naive to draw little birds in times like this. But maybe it’s not. Sometime I think maybe I should add more to society. But maybe that’s a struggle artists have in general. You feel a bit useless from time to time. Though, deep in my heart I feel as though, if there is no art, we are done. We’re definitely doomed and left to brutality and death without it.
“Deep in my heart I feel as though, if there is no art, we are done. We’re definitely doomed and left to brutality and death without it.”
128 JULY•PARANOIA