Winterfest Interview with Rosemarie Hauer
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Winterfest Interview with Rosemarie Hauer |
| Interviewer: | Winterfest |
| Interviewee: | Rosemarie Hauer |
| Date(s): | 2005 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Beauty and the Beast (TV) |
| External Links: | Winterfest Interview with Rosemarie Hauer, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
In 2005, Rosemarie Hauer was interviewed for Winterfest.
See Winterfest Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
Of course I did draw a little before B&B, but it’s hardly worth mentioning. What drew me to the B&B TV series was the character of Vincent in the first place. I didn’t know that in the beginning, but I do know now. It’s not so much that I ‘fell in love with him’; it’s more that I identified myself with him so intensely.
In those first days of watching B&B I dreamed about it several times. In one dream Vincent was a dying child whom I covered with my clothing. In another dream Vincent and I were children together, best friends who played in a forest. But in several other dreams I was Vincent. I experienced myself running up a hill, felt the cold air in my lungs as I was panting with exhaustion, and the muscles of my thighs hurt as I pushed myself to run even faster. Those dreams, which I still remember vividly after all these years, indicated to me how deeply I felt connected to Vincent.
It was the character of Vincent who drove me to draw him. When I saw the first pieces of art they took my breath away, but it took quite a while before it occurred to me to take up the pencil myself. I remember my first shaky drawing of a cloaked Vincent with flowing hair who was walking through the tunnels. I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an entire folder full of Vincent drawings?’ I didn’t know much about fandom back then, I’m not even sure if I had read my first fanzine by that time. Now I have several folders full of B&B drawings and once a year or so I take them down from the shelf and look through them, enjoying the wealth of feelings that I put into them and that come back to me at those moments.
I didn’t have any special training, neither for art nor for writing, so I like to say that Vincent was my teacher.
Pencil is the simplest media both in terms of getting naturalistic results and of being ready anytime. You can make corrections and interrupt and resume your work as you need it. It’s different with color media.
I started doing pen and inks, though. For a long time I drew portraits consisting of millions of tiny dots. I saw this with Beth Blighton’s and Barb Gipson’s art and it fascinated me.
I use photographs and video scans, for without them it would be impossible for me to get naturalistic results.
Illustrating zines, well – doing drawings that got used in zines, to be correct, was the first thing I did after encountering fandom and fan-fiction. It brought me in contact with many lovely people whom I adored and admired. It was very, very precious for me. Lynette Combs was the one who told me that she thought I would be illustrating zines soon. I got her permission to translate one of her stories into German, which was a hard job and quite an achievement, but worth the effort. Sadly I don’t remember the title of that story, but I do remember how deeply it touched me. I didn’t have a computer back then, so I can’t look it up.
I remember my first attempts at writing were writing down what I longed to see in the episodes. In German of course. And very, very furtively. I had never heard about such a thing as fan fiction. So my first access was writing after all. I had almost forgotten about that. I quickly dropped it after having read the first real fan stories, such as Sue Glasgow’s "Run to the Sea". I can’t even begin to tell you how impressed I was. "There I Will Make Thee A Bed of Roses" by Carole Whitehead was the first adult story I ever read, and it was fairly innocent compared with many of those that were yet to come.
The first story I wrote, if I remember it correctly, was a German story for a German fanclub magazine. Later I translated it into English and it appeared in my anthology "Magic", entitled "A Happy New Year". It’s a holiday season story and translating it was one hell of a job. From that time on I simply wrote my stories in English right from the start.