Scurf interview
#Scurf193: Conversation with Menah
Of Amélie, visual notes, and all things illustrations with the Dutch artist
Aug 09, 2024
For the latest edition of Conversations, I chat with Menah Wellen, an illustrator and visual notes artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
I’d like to kick off this conversation by sharing this visual note that I saw on your profile. It really made me stop in my tracks, pause and take time to really read through it!
Thank you!
Can you share a glimpse into the back alley of creating something so informative, interactive yet funky and endlessly engaging?
I have always found it easier to listen while drawing. It helps me focus and process information. When I was in art school (I studied Illustration at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the 2010s), our typography teacher was about to fail me for my work on his subject when he happened to glance at the notes I had made of the college’s weekly art history lectures. He went “ok, THESE are interesting,” and he ended up giving me a passing grade just for my notebook.
That’s how I learned that aside from helping me listen, visual notes can also help people engage with information. A visual summary gives a quick overview of what has been said and by whom, and allows us to pick up little bits of information in a non-linear way. This can make a visual more fun and accessible than written text, for example to those with limited time or attention spans. I’ve also noticed that drawings can help people understand and remember better, and feel more connected to the subject matter.
Drawings like the City-To-City one are made mostly live during an (offline or online) event. This way, I can gauge what quotes are having an impact on people, and pick up on little moments that would otherwise have been lost. In this case, it was a funny moment, where the moderator discovered a technical issue that made every single participant show up at the zoom meeting with her first and last name. In other cases, it can be someone in the back of a conference hall muttering an excellent counterpoint to the keynote speaker that otherwise wouldn’t have been heard by anyone.
Your website says that you’re comfortable both in Dutch and English. How has being bilingual helped you in your work?
It has obviously been very useful in expanding my horizons! Both in the diversity in clients I get to work with and the subject matter I engage with. A few weeks ago I was drawing from a horse carriage in the Swiss Alps, for a summit on global sustainability. Amazing.
By the way, I believe most Dutch people are more or less fluent in English. It makes sense for a tiny country not to expect everybody else to learn our weird and difficult language.
On the professional front, you and I work in the same ambit of social impact communications. How do you think illustrations and visual art in general has held its own in this sector?
Firstly, I think people who work in the social impact sector are cool&smart enough to value illustration as a means of communication. Secondly, speaking for myself, I think I just happen to have developed a style that can be used for social impact communication. It was never my plan, I just personally care a lot about social issues, which my work reflects. And thankfully there is a market for my way of working. This is not to say that it’s easy or that I don’t work very hard. And indeed, I think the illustration sector’s ‘holding its own’ exists by the grace of many of us being overworked, underpaid, and living with considerable material instability. If you ask me today if that’s worth doing what I love for a living, I’ll say yes, but feel free to ask me again when I’m 80 and have no pension or property.
While browsing your Insta feed I found this portrait. It stands out for me immediately because of the mood it captures and the colours you’ve used. This is a rare black and white in your collection and the atmosphere in it seems to be of a dissolving kind.
I kind of love that you picked this drawing in particular, because it is a drawing that I didn’t make with any kind of audience in mind. I just took a walk down the Amstel river in my neighborhood in Amsterdam on a gloomy day in December, and then made a drawing about it. The main thing it makes me think is how heavily my mood influences my drawing style. I don’t know why I made any of the visual choices I did for this drawing, and I wouldn’t be able to make the same drawing today.
How would you say you got into illustrations and the graphic arts from a young age? Any early influences?
Drawing has been my best friend since I can remember. It has always been my favorite thing to do, my main way of expressing and explaining myself, an essential tool for processing life. There’s a key motivator in my work today that, looking back, I realize was already there when I was a child. I would make drawings or art projects for my relatives’ birthdays, often also about them. I think seeing their reactions taught me that my drawings could make people feel seen. I find that very powerful.
When my sister taught me how to read and write as a little kid, I immediately started making illustrated stories on the back of typed-up A4s from my moms work, stapled together into little books. I grew up with books illustrated by Quentin Blake, and Dutch illustration icons like Carl Hollander, Dick Bruna, Philip Hopman, and Fiep Westendorp.
(Fiep Westendorp actually started a foundation at the end of her life, that grants subsidies to illustrators who are just starting out. Being awarded one of these subsidies is what enabled me to launch my career after graduating art school.)
It’s not that I always knew I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to be able to draw realistic portraits, I wanted my colors to blend into each other (a steep ambition for someone who mainly worked with felt tip markers), I wanted to spend my life making Gaudí-esque buildings, old-timey dresses, cat sculptures and dollhouses, and then Amélie Poulain inspired me to be the most obnoxious version of myself who would do things like write lusciously illustrated poetic love letters and send them out anonymously to whomever I deemed in need of my benevolent charity.
Ultimately, I think my instinct to make things, combined with my drive to custom-make them for others, are what set me on the path of what is now my job.
I just hope I’m less annoying now. And these days I’m not 99% influenced by European white men, which should help.
Outside of commissioned work, how often do you create something for yourself?
Every day-ish, mostly in journal-form. Although I have periods where I get distracted from drawing by other projects like knitting, quilting, looking up archive photography of Amsterdam, organizing data sets in Google Sheets, reorganizing my sock drawer, collecting Polaroid cameras, making puppets, making jewelry or building furniture.
How do you find inspiration? Do you have an ideas book or an app on your phone where you jot down things on the go?
I keep a journal for my personal thoughts. (From 1994 until now, I have never been able to shut up and therefore I am now at journal number 92.) I have a rigidly structured notebook with tabs for research and ideas. I WhatsApp myself links to interesting articles. My saved posts on Instagram are divided into 28 categories. My photo roll on my phone is terrifying because I constantly take secret pictures of people so I can draw them later. My notes app is a mess, because it’s only the one page and I type everything in there at random. It includes funny things my friends said, how to say “hello, how are you” in Azerbaijani, and a menacing poem I wrote to my friend about how I’m going to beat him at table tennis. (I didn’t, by the way.)
Menah with all her notebooks! Photo courtesy: Tjade Bouma.
Other than the visual medium, what are the other cultures you find yourself drawn to, especially for inspiration?
Language; wordplay, lyrics, rhymes, puns. I will use my dying breath to make a terrible joke.
Do you create all your work digitally or is it also sometimes on paper? Is there a difference between the work that comes out of these two mediums?
I made the switch to digital about eight years ago. I do still make analog work; I am part of the visual notes team Getekend Verslag (EventScribes), and we draw together at conferences using markers on meters of foamboard. I also draw in my journal with pens, markers and occasionally watercolor.
I regularly look at analog drawings, my own and those of others, and think ‘there’s just something about this that digital can’t compete with.’ But for me, drawing on an iPad is just hugely convenient. Especially when traveling somewhere to draw on the spot, and being able to share the work immediately through social media or on a large screen. So I try to develop a digital style that at least holds a candle to the quality of analog work. And it has advantages, too, for instance: drawing digitally allows you to take big risks and try out huge brushes and strange colors. If you don’t like the result, you can just hit undo.
A lot has happened in the space of visual arts over the last decade in terms of innovation with social media apps and other such platforms. How do you view this growth? And how has it impacted your work?
As someone who finished art school in 2011, I think (or hope) I belong to one of the last generations who got trained for a world of print media and then graduated into a world of social media. As an art student, I never imagined that the trajectory of my career would be influenced by how well an illustration works on the screen of a smartphone. But it has been, very much - one of the main reasons I’ve gone digital is because I suck at taking good pictures of my analog work. This problem is coming back to haunt me in the current modern times, because it is now trendy to post videos of yourself making your art. I don’t think it’s going to change any time soon, either, because we now need to be able to prove that our art wasn’t AI generated.
Here’s the thing though: setting up a camera at a good angle with adequate lighting to film yourself while avoiding the video ending up being just your head obstructing the entire screen for the whole time is boring and I hate it. Anyway, I love social media, it’s a great way to see what everybody’s up to, it has opened so many doors for me (the disabled community for example joins forces online in ways it otherwise wouldn’t be able to), and it has connected me to so many people I would have never heard of or met otherwise - including you!
Like Sartrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Alan Moore’s Watchmen, what are the graphic novels, comics or illustrative books that you find immensely moving or inspiring?
Grass (2019) by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, the story of a Korean girl who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the second World War. If I may offer a visual spoiler: in 496 pages, sexual assault is never shown, but always felt. The story will make you lose your will to live, the drawing style will make you gain it back.
Leben oder Theater? (made in the years leading up to 1943, published in 1961) by Charlotte Salomon. An autobiographical work consisting of almost 1300 gouache paintings, made with increasing haste, until Salomon was murdered by the nazis in 1943. The text in the paintings is in German, which I cannot read, yet this is one of my favorite books of all time. Her drawing style is unique, as is her storytelling, which often consists of pages and pages of just somebody’s face over and over again as they talk.
The work of an artist is also a lot about observing, pausing to absorb and really paying attention. This could happen visually, or while listening to something or just while being alone in a park. As a writer, I often come up with a germ of an idea when I’m walking.
Do you have a similar specific space, emotionally, physically and intellectually where you can access ideas better?
Ideas and inspiration come to me often and kind of from all directions. I have a detail-oriented mind and a tendency to notice patterns, associate, and make connections.
For example, in the visual you shared at the beginning of this interview, there’s a quote that says “There’s a lack of evidence that is Global South-led.” My thought process for a drawing about that will go something like this:
🔔 How do you visualize ‘evidence’? It can be a book, or maybe a brain. The latter would probably be more fitting than a book, as one of the reasons the speaker would mention a lack of ‘evidence’ from the Global South is that the Global North has a tendency to ignore or undervalue things outside books, like Oral History, from the Global South.
🔔 How do you visualize ‘the Global South’? Well, for instance by drawing a globe.
🔔 We now have a brain and a globe, and this is where we can look for any possible visual rhymes to connect them to each other. I find two: a globe and a brainpan are both a circle-shape. And where the globe is being divided into a northern and a southern half by our speaker, the brain also has two halves.
🔔 Now that we have our concept (brain-globe), the last thing to visualize is the lack of evidence from the Global South. So in the end, my drawing will show two people standing on the brain-globe, on the northern half of its brain, looking down at the other half of the brain they are not accessing.
What I would add as an answer to your question, is that while ideas and inspiration come relatively easy to me, I find it very challenging to recognize when an idea or a spark of inspiration is worth stopping in my tracks for, worth capturing, or worth revisiting later. As I mentioned, I have many systems for this, but obviously there’s limited time to put your energy into something.
Who are your inspirations? Artists you look up to?
I was recently blown away by graphic/illustrated novels by Lee Lai, Nino Bulling, Tja Ling, and Ludwig Volbeda.
Also mind blowing graphic novel authors: Jillian and/or Mariko Tamaki, Tillie Walden, Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco.
Artworks (original or print) on the walls in our house that I love (and arguably literally look up to) are by: Aiden Wong (a giant original drawing of a girl in a huge blue sea, done entirely in blue ballpoint), Joana Estrela, Tara Booth, Yin Yin Wong, Hannah Polak, Evan M. Cohen, Tove Jansson, David Shrigley, Anne Stalinski, Benjamin Li (a mug with a picture of Chinese food on it), Pony People (a ceramic worm), Joost Stokhof, and a print of a painting of a girl standing in a toilet made by Harrie Geelen that I’ve had my entire life.
Coming to this other illustration I found on your feed: I loved this lady and her thinking shoes! I feel that with this one you were perhaps thinking on the page while drawing? Does that happen?
That’s what I love about illustration, and art in general. I have a pair of shoes like that. And when I found a brush that happened to mimic the pattern on the shoes, I couldn’t stop drawing shoes because I enjoyed how the pattern kept working out. But now that you’re inviting me to look at this drawing through different eyes, there is meaning to be found. This could be a drawing about being overwhelmed by paths to choose from, and not realizing that you’ve already chosen. A drawing about overthinking that I drew while underthinking.
Do you sometimes feel a pressure to produce new work? If yes, how do you cope?
Yeah, if I’ve just spent a few weeks producing client work to pay the bills, and then I go on instagram and see other people’s beautiful, skillful and/or meaningful work, I will get jealous and feel like I’m wasting my time and missing out on opportunities. In fact, I have a folder on my computer called ‘jealousy driven ambitions,’ where I collect the FOMO-inducing stuff I encounter, so that I can revisit it when I have time to see if it’s actually something I want to pursue.
Of course, I’m most likely to produce anything personally meaningful when I don’t feel pressure.
As for client work, there is always pressure, and you just have to produce the work or you won’t get paid. And with live drawing work, there is immense time pressure, which actually works very well for me because it forces me not to be perfectionist.
Are there any upcoming artists in your space whose work you admire and you’d want to share with us?
Visual notes: Ageeth van der Veen, Julia van Leeuwen, Eva Hilhorst, Maria Fraaije, Yara Rubi
Comics: Maarten van der Meer
Illustration: Sosse Serpenti, Lae Schafer
Tattoo: Leyla Ali
Photography: Tom Roelofs, Tjade Bouma, Prins de Vos
Music: Edita Karkoschka, Mesin Slat, cobi baby, Wynnm
Spoken word: Vahini Saman
(Some of these are actually quite established by now but just in case you didn’t know them, now you do)
What next on the charts for you?
Visual notes! I’ve been making live illustrations at events for over a decade, and the field has grown a lot since then. But many people still don’t know the scope of visual journalism, when it has so much to offer. There’s a page on my website where I’ve put some examples of visual summaries, and the ways in which they can be used. Take a look if you like: https://www.menah.nl/blog/visual-notes-gallery
And for your Dutch readers: one project close to my heart right now is the visual column I make for Wordt Vervolgd, the magazine published by Amnesty NL. They’re giving me complete freedom as long as the comic is human rights-related. I’m very thankful for this opportunity to talk about things that matter to me in this world, and do it in comic-form.
As my bestie Frank Costanza would say: I got a lot of problems with you people, and now you're gonna hear about it!
If you enjoyed reading this, the next conversation will reach you same time, same place next Friday! Subscribe here & share with the reader types!
