100 girls on cheap paper

Some words and pictures from Tina Berning...a Berlin-based illustrator whose wonderful book "100 Girls on Cheap Paper" ($24.95) we carry in the shop...

"It is the quality of drawing in general that omission leaves space for imagination. I start to tell a story and the viewer can complete it."

"For my research I flip through everything I can find: magazines, photo books from the flea market, old postcards, whatever. When I was a student, we went to Italy once a year, working in an abandoned village in Tuscany for a few weeks. There, I found beautiful forgotten paper in empty houses — remains telling stories of people who left some 20 or 40 years ago. I started to get addicted to these papers, the stories they tell themselves and the associations that evolve when I add drawings to them."

"As my main object of drawing is figure, clothes are always a part of my drawings, as the apparel of a figure. I love fashion, not for the brands (I am somebody who spends hours, erasing logos from sunglasses with fine sandpaper…), but for the system itself, the cultural indication, and the aesthetic possibilities. I am interested in the interplay of volume and lines, the architecture of wrapping, and the expression of disguise. I love natural-born glamour, something that can’t be bought."