Christoph Niemann
Craft is the one thing you have any control over as an artist
Christoph Niemann is an artist, author and animator. His work appears regularly on the covers of The New Yorker, National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine.
Christoph’s art has been subject to numerous museum retrospectives. He has drawn live from the Venice Art Biennale, the Olympic Games in London, and he has sketched the New York City Marathon — while actually running it. He created The New Yorker’s first Augmented Reality Cover as well as a hand-drawn 360-degree VR animation for the magazine’s US Open issue.
Clients include Hermés, Google, LAMY, and the MOMA.
IN THE STUDIO WITH CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
Pursuing a creative life means living a life filled with dreams, doubts, and very complex challenges. What keeps you going in difficult times?
Craft. It’s the one thing you have any control over as an artist.
Please describe your creative process. Do you have any daily habits or an everyday routine? A pattern you follow? A specific flow you embrace when you create? How do you know the work is finished?
It is pretty mechanical: I sit down at 9am, have a coffee, read the news. And then I just start. I have a drawing desk and a computer desk, that’s where everything happens. No music, no direct sunlight. And my trick: get all the obvious ideas out first. Otherwise they clog the system.
Do you ever run out of creativity and inspiration? If so, how do you handle creative blocks and overcome them? How do you get out of a creative rut?
I don’t like the term “creative block” because that makes it sound like an anomaly. As if the normal state of creation would be some sort of magic flow. In my case “the creative process” is a long string of very unspectacular decision-making: should this be a triangle or a square? Should it be red or blue? Does the bunny need longer ears? After hours or even days of that, I may (rarely) end up with an image that may cause an “AHA” moment with a viewer. But that doesn’t mean that any AHA was involved in the creation.
Once I learned to accept that the path to an idea consists of many tiny unsexy stumbles, I’ve become much happier.