While searching for the New School Free Press’s office, Keren Hasson used the monkey emojis to express her embarrassment over not knowing her way around the 11th Street building. I gave her general directions and told her to text me if that makes sense. “yeah think so *monkey emoji*.”
We met in the dingy Free Press office on a cold Tuesday evening. She shifted in her seat, smiling shyly, tucking a stray strand of hair under the Chicago Bulls hat she was wearing backwards. “Do you want me to give, like, an artist statement?” she asked, giggling nervously. We decided against it.
“I’m an illustrator and I do screen printing,” said Hasson, a Parsons senior majoring in Illustration Design. “I mostly use black and white ink, dip pen stuff. It’s pretty fantasy based.”
She paused. “And I’m working on a graphic novel.”
The novel, Hasson says, is based on a story her mother’s aunt wrote about her experience in the Holocaust when her family was divided into different concentration camps.
“My mom translated it from Hebrew to French and I’m translating it from French to English,” Hasson said. “My friend and I are working on a story that is adapted from that and then making a graphic novel from that. That’s my big project.”
Hasson started the project in the fall of 2014 as part of a class assignment and decided that rather than telling the story as it was, she would transform it into something uniquely her own.
“I decided I would use that story to adapt into mine and use all my characters in my world, that I have in my head and incorporate that into an adapted one,” she said.
I asked what the storyline of the graphic novel would be and I could tell that she was searching for a way to form a digestible synopsis for others to take in.
“It’s a long and complicated thing. How do I even condense?” She paused to find the words, her eyes scanning the ceiling. “We sat with it the other week and there are so many questions unanswered, like, this is cool but why did that happen and how do we explain that?”
The novel is about a family whose island is taken over by a darkness, “which we haven’t totally figured out yet. They get transported to this different island where they’re made to work, which is pretty much the concentration camps. But the story is super-based on the stories that she tells of [my mom’s aunt’s] experience.”
She said that the graphic novel is just one of the many things she’s working on. She is finishing up her illustration degree while working at a print shop in Brooklyn called Bushwick Print Lab. She is also preparing for a solo show at an art gallery upon graduation, which will be in three short months.
Hasson laughed when asked about her future goals, admitting that she should probably be thinking about it more.
“In the long run, it would be cool to work at an independent animation studio like Augenblick in Brooklyn or Titmouse,” she said.
As for where she hopes to take the graphic novel, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish it by the end of this semester so my goal is to have several drawings for it but hopefully I’ll have at least one or two chapters done that I’ll be able to get sent out to bind.”