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Olivier Kugler
‘Carnets'
Olivier Kugler was the overall winner of the 2011 V&A Illustration Awards for his depiction of a truck driver’s journey across Iran, as featured in French quarterly reportage magazine XXI. Rendered in Olivier's familiar sketchbook style, the thirty page illustrated journal tells the story of the illustrator's trip with Massih, a truck driver Olivier met in Tehran and whom he accompanied for a four-day journey carrying bottled water down to a small island in the Persian Gulf.
Carnets:
Shetlands to Cuba:
In the spring/early summer of 2007 I travelled from Scotland to Cuba. I took the ferry from Aberdeen to the Shetland Islands and another ferry from there to the Faroe Islands. After a week of traveling through the islands I jumped on the ferry to Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. From there I drove a rental car to Reykjavik. My next stop was New York where I spent two weeks before driving down to Miami. From there I flew via the Bahamas to Cuba. For the travel section of "The Guardian" newspaper in London I drew an illustrated documentation of the journey.
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Turkey/Iran:
In the spring of 2009 I traveled through Turkey and Iran. I took the train (three day journey) from Istanbul to Tabriz in the Northeast of Iran. In Iran I first spent two weeks traveling along the Armenian and azerbayjani border region to the Caspian Sea to Tehran, Yahzd, Esfahan and back to Tehran. In Tehran I met Massih, an Iranian truck driver, who invited me to join him on a four-day journey carrying bottled water to Kish, a small island in the Persian Gulf. I did a small series of illustrations documenting the train journey from Istanbul to Tabriz and of my stay in Iran. For the French quarterly reportage magazine "XXI" I drew a 30-page illustrated journal about Massih's journey across Iran.
Laos:
In January 2011 I joined the French veterinarian Bertrand Bouchard on a week long mission through the remote region of North West Laos. Bertrand works for the French charity ElefantAsia which is devoted to the conservation and breeding of domesticated elephants in Laos. At the moment I am working on an illustrated documentation about the week I spent with the doctor and the elephants who are mainly working in the countries partly legal… partly illegal logging industry.
Olivier KuglerOlivier Kugler was born in 1970 in Stuttgart, Germany. He grew up in Simmozheim, a small village, in the Black Forest. Influenced by French/Belgian bande desinées and Otto Dix. After military service in the Navy, Olivier studied graphic design in Pforzheim (Germany) and worked as a designer in Karlsruhe for a few years... got terribly bored with it and received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to do a masters degree in illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then Olivier has worked as an illustrator in London and for clients all over the world. Likes to do reportage illustrations... loves to draw people he meets and places he visits. Prefers to draw on location or from own reference photos. Olivier likes to colour his drawings on his laptop.
Clients include: The Guardian, XXI, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's.