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1991 - today (Newspaper/Magazines)

AOK/BLEIB GESUND/LIFE, BUSINESS 2.0, CAPITAL, CONNECT, DB MAGAZIN, DER FALTER (ÖSTERREICH), DIE ZEIT,
EURO, FINANZTEST, FINANCIAL TIMES DEUTSCHLAND, FOCUS, FOCUS MONEY, FÜR SIE, GEOLINO, GEO SAISON,
GEO WISSEN, HANDELSBLATT, HÄUSER, HOW TO SPEND IT, IMPULSE, MAX, MANAGER MAGAZIN, MORGEN (ÖSTERREICH),
NETBUSINESS, ONLINE TODAY, ÖSTERREICHISCHE BAUZEITUNG, PETRA, RHEINISCHER MERKUR, ROTARY MAGAZIN,
SCHÖNER WOHNEN, SPIEGEL, SPIEGEL SPECIAL, STERN, TAZ, TELEBÖRSE, TV SPIELFILM, TXT.HYPE, VIGO RHEINLAND,
ZEIT MAGAZIN etc.
(Advertising): BMW, EADS, KARSTADT AG, RAVENSBURGER SPIELE, REEMTSMA, TOURISTIKVERBAND NIEDERÖSTERREICH, UNICEF, USB ZÜRICH,  etc.

Q1: Daniel Matzenbacher, thanks so much for your time, we’re really excited to have you and your agency with us as guest ‘creative of the week.’ Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and give us a potted history of your career and training?

A: I’m one of those late-blooming autodidacts. I was born on the left bank of the lower Rhine and I always loved to draw as often as I could, but in my youth I was way too flaky and unfocussed to turn it into any sort of viable career option. At that time all I wanted to do was make music. It was when I when I turned 30 that things really started to take off. After a couple of years freelancing as a graphic designer, I was picked up by the representation agency Becker/Derouet (formerly of Hamburg) who all of a sudden started chucking loads of work my way. Until the mid 1990s I did conventional illustrations for ad agencies and magazines. Even from the get go I worked for top-notch addresses; Stern, Spiegel, Zeit Magazine and such like. In 1995 I bought my first computer, just on a whim, to see what would happen. I very soon realised that the apple was the ultimate collage machine. That’s how I still use it today.

Q2: What’s the primary focus of Matzenbacher Illustration and what special services do you offer?

A: The central focus of my work is without a doubt the digital collage. I work with a, by now, vast back catalogue of found and self-made source imagery, including for example old advertising illustrations, photos, text snippets, old paper. Any old found objects. A completely soaked and filthy fragment of paper found in a gutter somewhere with the barely legible print ‘Control’ is a real treasure! I quite often take my camera out and photograph anything and everything; structures, surfaces or physical spaces, I scan dead flies or mouldy bits of pizza. There are absolutely no limits in terms of my imagery. By the way, I often use my own hands for the hands of my figures. And of course I use online picture archives.

Apart from colour tweaking and the occasional filter, I pretty much never work with computer-generated imagery. Any 3D bits and pieces that pop up in my work are built, not rendered. My way of working is always intuitive, for the most part without a plan and lives or dies by allowing the space for coincidences to occur. Beyond the key ideas in the manuscript, it’s about the little details or a certain ambience that just happens or becomes evident through the process of the work - now that’s really exciting! By the way, this principle pretty much applies to all other areas of my life!

Q3: Who are your main clients? Do you have a particular focus or representative clients?

People often book me for content that is difficult to interpret. Often it’ll be scientific material, for example, for “Geo Wissen” or “Focus” magazines. I’ve worked on the “Chances” and “Knowledge” sections of “Die Zeit” for a long time, as well as stuff with a historical or political bent. For example, a weekly historical retrospective over the course of two years for the “Düsseldorfer Handelsblatt,” or themes such as “a Re-evaluation of the Middle” for the “Rotary Magazine” - heady stuff! Jobs like these introduce a journalistic angle into the illustrator’s task. In any case the bulk of my work in the last few years has been in the finance and economics sector for “Manager Magazine” or ”Impulse.” Above all until the end of 2012, for nearly eight years, I illustrated the Monday edition of the “Portfolio” page in the “Financial Times Deutschland,” which has since then, as we all know, taken care of itself in spectacular fashion (which is both a blessing and a curse). Lifestyle themes crop up very infrequently for me, my style is too complicated, too unflat and at the end of the day not trendy enough. Apart from all that, it’s an area in which other colleagues of mine feel way more at home. The only exception to this rule would be the monthly piece written by Wais Kiani in the likewise defunct “How to spend it.”

Q4: What’s your take on creativity versus what’s technically possible? Taking these possibilities into account, how has the illustrator’s role developed and or changed in the last few years?

A: I don’t have the feeling that the illustrator’s role has changed all that much in the last 20 years. The job remains the same. What has changed, however, is the world, the media landscape and generally accepted societal expectations around the quality of content. What’s with versus, anyway? I don’t believe that constantly expanding technical possibilities necessarily creates barriers to creativity. Let’s reframe the question: creativity versus instant gratification. By that I mean, when talent and passion have access to modern technology, all is well and good, of course the talentless and the average also have access to the same technology, but that’s not so bad. What’s bad is when an increasingly dumbed-down-through-the-media society loses the ability to retain or develop criteria to differentiate between quality and rubbish.

Q5: What sort of chances and potential for development do you see for illustrators in the coming years? Are web and interactivity opening up new frontiers?

A: Inevitably so, yes. The magazine landscape is going to move more and more towards online delivery. If that’s good or bad, has yet to be seen. In any case, my fear is that this shift will have a negative impact on remuneration levels. How far this goes hand in hand with ‘the end of print,’ I don’t like to speculate, but this doom and gloom prediction has been around for a while now, and in actual fact I’m astounded that the print magazine market is still so large.

Q6: What’s have you got planned for your next project?

A: Well, at all costs surviving. At the moment I’m in the process of renovating my studio and work systems. As a result of this I’ve dusted off my somewhat neglected ‘conventional’ workspace, in order to reinstate my non-digital, hand-made mode of working to its previous importance. Over and above this, I’m putting together a portfolio of digital portraits, book cover designs and typographic work. All subjects that have interested me for a long time and to which I’m now giving my serious attention. Finally, I’ll be (hopefully) exhibiting my work more often!

Q7: Creativity on command is usually a recipe for disaster - how do you top up energy levels for your next projects?

A: Well, it’s not exactly a process that I have to really work on. I’m a freelancer, which means that in my case I have my studio at home. Private life and work blend into each other anyway, in quite a chaotic way. My 17-year-old son lives with me, which can also be fun. I’ve been a musician all of my life (drums) and I’m often in rehearsal spaces or at sessions. I just don’t think about techniques to make creativity happen. When I don’t have any ideas, then it’s because I don’t want to work. Quite apart from that “the idea” as a flash of brilliance doesn’t happen like that for me, it’s a fragmented process in the extreme, in which things are shoved around, tried out and discarded. Making art is a lot of hard work and especially making art-for-hire.

MATZENBACHER illustration
hopfenstr.8  20359 hamburg
phone  ++ 49 (0) 40-382589
mobile ++ 49 (0)171 471405
mail(at)matzenbacher.de

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websitedesign - programming, Daniel Matzenbacher / (link) NETZBAR MEDIA

english translation - (link) TESSA SINCLAIR SCOTT