SIX 31

ART

SIX 30

Her illustrations may be dominated by strong black lines, but dull they are not. Copenhagen-born designer and illustrator Naja Conrad-Hansen employs her dark colour palette to great effect, creating striking contrasts and images that exude character and vivacity.

conrad-NAJAhansen

by Kate Stanbury

With an artist as her mother and a graphic designer as her grandfather, Conrad-Hansen was born into an incredibly artistic family. When asked whether her family influenced her choice of career, she jests that she was force-fed turpentine and oil colours as a child. But the truth is, although Conrad-Hansen was supplied with endless amounts of wonderful paints and canvases, the decision to pursue a career in illustration was entirely her own.Now the success-ful independent artist behind MEANNORTH, she lives and works in Copenhagen, but, since her birth, she has lived in many parts of the world, from Greece to Egypt. However, it was in Berlin where she first started to move away from the playful experimentation of her youth and began to paint ‘for real’. Her extensive travels have led to her fluency in Danish, Finnish, German and English, but, she adds to these another language: illustration. Conrad-Hansen considers her artistic creativity to be a way of communicating, on an intuitive and emo-tional level, but without the rules and restrictions of a conventional language; immersing herself in design and illustration gives her the freedom to express her-self in a way that only she dictates. She admits that

the situation is very different when working with cli-ents, describing her role as more of a visual translator, but nevertheless she is able to use her own unique and expressive visual language to translate their ideas.From distorted faces to horse-riding monkeys, Conrad-Hansen’s images are teeming with original and quirky details. Her impactful female figures ooze attitude and personality. The artist conjures a life for each of her characters, and uses pencil, ink, feather

pen, watercolour and oils to articulate their stories. Her illustrations are stimulating, striking and inspiring; yet Conrad-Hansen struggles to define exactly what inspires her. The inspiration for her colour palette comes from a variety of sources, from experi-menting on paper to objects that she finds beautiful or ugly. To Naja Conrad-Hansen, in-

spiration is not static, but forever changing. In fact, change is extremely important to the artist. If you ask her to specify her career highlight, she will always name her latest work; what she considers to be her greatest achievement changes as her career progress-es. The work that she has just completed for Louis Vuitton is the highlight of her career – for now. But, if you ask her in a few months, who knows what it may be. §

“inspiration is not static,but forever changing”