100 Girls on Cheap Paper

“The Perfection of Imperfection”

In today’s continually developing era of our big big online world nearly nothing seems to be impossible anymore. No matter if there is any mistake in a photography, if it’s too dark, if it’s blurry or whatever could be annoying, we are only a few clicks away from making a quite normal picture to something special or to totally change it. Definitely an important possibility and a big profit in many areas, but likewise it also offers a really essential resource for the work of our artists today. Perfection in everybody’s reach and even realisable?!

A very interesting book called ‘100 Girls on Cheap Paper’ published by illustrator Tina Berning takes up exactly this “ambivalence” between perfection and imperfection and shows 100 of her original and uncorrected sketches she collected since a long time which are supposed to represent how adorable mistakes in a picture could be. Normally it would be weird to see white stripes of a correction pen in the middle of a photo, or a drawing on a simple old notebook site with strange instructions on it, but these little imperfections of Tina’s illustrations indeed have their own charm. “If I always would correct everything, all of it becomes so perfect. But often it is still more beautiful when everything isn’t always that perfect. Sometimes I forget this when I’m making my corrections on the computer.”

For the creative work in her own atelier, Tina decided to isolate the digital area from the area she’s working, so that she is able to focus herself totally on her creative work. The selection of photos out of her book are just a small result of these untroubled moments. And there is one word on a photo which isn’t actually really noticeable but what could be suitable to describe the book finally with an lasting effect. Namely the word “REVOLUTION”.

100 Girls on Cheap Paper (Chronicle Books, 192 pages) – worth seeing!

Review by Sarah Klose