Jenny Brosinski [ Germany ]

Jenny Brosinski, born in 1975 in Celle, studied Free Graphics, Illustration, Animation and Book Design in Hamburg and Berlin and spent a term studying abroad on a scholarship from the German French Youth Foundation (Deutsch-Französischen Jugendwerk) at the »École supérieure des arts décoratifs« in Strasbourg. For some years, she has worked as a freelance graphic artist and illustrator for various publishers and, aside from children's and art books, also produces large format art prints and drawings on a free range of themes.

Her début as an author of children's books came in 2006 with the publication of her thesis on the poem »Good Night; or, The Long Way to Bed« by the contemporary children's poet Frantz Wittkamp, and the tale it tells in spoonerisms of the journey to sleep. The illustrator devised her own font as well as the pictures and characters, and also managed to elevate the pictures to an equal footing with the text, enabling the images to pick up on matter from the text, arrange it and continue telling the story. The side scenes and associative empty spaces allow the reader to constantly discover new details and contexts in the pictures. The tight contextual interplay between image and text is supported by Jenny Brosinski with her choice of technique and a rather playful style. The illustrator described her process in the graduation book of the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in 2007: »I drew my characters and parallel stories in thin pencil lines and then coloured them with a mixture of watercolours, pencil crayons, acrylics and black tea. The mood of the font highlights the lightness of the text and the pictures«. Her second children's book has as its text a classic narrative: Friedrich Schiller's »Die Bürgschaft« (2009, tr: The Hostage). The story of Damon—who leaves home to bring an end to the tyrant's rule over his home country, fails in this, is taken prisoner, and then leaves his best friend as a guarantee—has been adorned by the illustrator with light, filigree watercolour sketches. She moves the ballad—with its themes of friendship, trust and a race—against time into a contemporary context, with great attention to detail and subtlety and the skillful use of quotations, all of which open up new perspectives.

Jenny Brosinski has won many national and international awards for her drawings, which have been shown, among others, in the »Salon du livre de jeunesse« in Paris, as well as in solo and group exhibitions across Germany. She has lived in Berlin since 2006.