Renate Boere made a number of conscious design choices, with the aim of generating new clients for Christie van der Haak. The most important choice was not to simply make an oeuvre book. Especially for an aging artist, an oeuvre book ends a period rather than heralds a new era. “I wanted Christie van der Haak’s latest work to play the leading role throughout the book.” Studio Renate Boere translated Van der Haak’s world of experience into a contemporary fairytale book, in which you wander through palace halls, constructed from patterns that have never been shown before.

There were two reasons to undertake this time-consuming exercise. The first was that it created a unique fairy tale book, a book that draws you into the world of Christie van der Haak page after page. This creates new works in which the paintings seem to continue endlessly on all pages. The paintings are interrupted by virtual spaces that indicate the end of a series (read fairy tale) and herald a new series of works.

A second motivation for creating virtual spaces was to give potential customers an idea of ​​how the patterns work in application and thus convince them of the power and uniqueness of the patterns.

To realize the virtual spaces, Studio Renate Boere, with a team of seven, duplicated patterns into large pattern sheets, colored them where necessary and incorporated them into the virtual rooms. Some of the published rooms were created by making real models. These models were then illuminated and photographed. Beautiful showrooms were created. It also sometimes seems as if you are wandering through a game in which you end up in a more difficult level each time.

The text pages refer to the very typical, traditional fairy tale books: text blocks are surrounded by a wide, illustrated frame. These illustrations show the richness, variety and uniqueness of Christie’s previously unseen and applied patterns. For anyone interested in patterns, the book can serve as a huge source of inspiration. At the back of the book, her best work per series is shown in chronological order. More than 500 works – not even a fifth of all her work – provide an overview of Christie van der Haak’s development to date: from painter to installation artist.