Hi!
My name is Reine Kurth. I'm from a village in Lorraine, France, and I live and work in Bremen, Germany, where I found love :) I'm a developer of embedded software, currently for the space industry, and a freelance illustrator, with a preference for book and editorial illustration.
Since 2003 I'd had a website to share my art that I'd called créatures éphémères
. First it was on shared hosting at free.fr's, then since 2010 on my own virtual server at Gandi's – that's where you are now :)
In the course of 2017 I decided to pursue illustration as a career – an idea I'd been playing with for a long time, maybe forever ;) A website with my (full) name seemed the easiest to remember for potential clients ;) Actually I'd been struggling with créatures éphémères
for a while, finding the name too long and too difficult to pronounce – even for French speakers ;) Thus in 2018 I launched reine kurth : illustration (reinekurth.com) :)
But the name créatures éphémères
and its story are dear to my heart so I'll keep this domain for a while ;)
So what does créatures éphémères
mean?
The translation, simply enough, is ephemeral creatures
. Here's the story ;)
So back in 2003 I started my first website to share my art. I did not want to use my last name in the site's name, maybe because it felt too formal. And I could not find a catchy use of my first name. Also the latter means queen
in French which I thought could sound smug to someone who didn't know it was my real name ;)
At that time I happened to be re-reading Yukito Kishiro's cyberpunk manga Gunnm, that you may know as Battle Angel Alita. The motorball
story arc is probably my favorite:
There I stumbled upon that panel where the anchorman welcomes the audience to the race with the words:
Hey! Hey! Welcome to you all, strange ephemeral creatures…! Now it is time to open the gates of Hell!
This is translated from… the translation in that initial French edition (1996), which is certainly different from the translation published in English. The panel has also been translated differently in the original edition
released by Glénat in France starting in 2016 (the comments on the linked article say that the new translation stinks though) ;)
créatures éphémèresI like that geeky origin of the name :) And then that, applied to a website displaying art and especially a lot of character art, the ephemeral creatures
can be understood as these works (creations
) in general, as the depicted characters – or, in the spirit of the Gunnm quote, as the artist, the viewer, and humans in general. Deep philosophical layers of meaning, you see ;P
That's all folks! Thanks for bearing with me :) Now you can head to my new website and hire me as an illustrator ;)