“Colors influence our feelings. They can make us happy or sad, comfort us or make us feel hungry”. When the two non-fiction books “Sehen” and “Hören” by the Ukrainian artist couple Romana Romanyschyn and Andrij Lessiw (translated by Claudia Dathe) were published by Gerstenberg Verlag last year, nobody could have known how important the award-winning titles had become.
In the volume “Seeing” – illustrated in a sophisticated computer technique reminiscent of screen printing in the colors yellow, blue, ocher and neon – a little girl experiences what we perceive with our most important sense organ. In short, concise sentences, it learns something about the function of the eye, the meaning of characters or pictograms and how the blind can read and write with Braille. “I see more than my eyes can see,” the little girl thinks, playing with her imagination.
In their second non-fiction book “Hören”, Romana Romanyschyn and Andrij Lessiw tell and illustrate that you also need other senses to understand the world, again using sophisticated computer technology.
Here, too, they succeed in making tones and the sources of the noises that we hear all the time visually visible. In the beginning it was quiet, then came the big bang, then it got loud. “The universe filled with sounds”. Since then, the world has been full of sounds that arrive in our ears as sound. It explains how the ear is constructed to hear tones, how the sound of musical instruments is created, what noises the human body develops and what abilities people have to communicate without tones. “Sometimes we don’t understand each other, then we feel lonely. But you can find a common language and understand each other even without words.”
(The Gerstenberg Verlag will send the proceeds of these two non-fiction picture books (each 56 pages, 20 euros each) to the artist couple, who fled to a small town south of Lviv. From there they organize and support the refugee aid.)