Mari Kanstad Johnsen (born 1981) joined Tegnerforbundet in 2015. Her teeming, rich universe populates multiple platforms: books, comics, posters and walls, just to name a few. A keen sense of observation combined with a sense of humor with a certain sting adds an extra dimension to her work. Whether she is commenting on emotional states of mind or animating mountains, her distinctive idiom feels as at home between two binders as it does in the gallery space. Mari Kanstad Johnsen lives and works in Oslo.
TF: Mari, can you tell us a little about your artistic work?
MKJ: I am educated at KHIO and Konstfack, with a main focus on illustration and animation during my education.
Today I work with both personal artistic projects, illustration on commission, and I write children's books.
TF: How do you use drawing in your work? Can you tell us a bit about your working process?
MKJ: When I work on free projects I mainly work intuitively with ink and brush or pencil.
When I illustrate books or create, for example, editorial illustrations, I often first work analogically with a pencil, scan and process/colour digitally. For me, it is liberating to be able to work both completely artistically and independently AND against different assignments, the two quite different ways of working give energy and new ideas back and forth.
TF: What inspires you? Do you work from a theme?
MKJ: A lot are fragments of stories, visualization of thoughts I have about relationships between people, different dynamics, and pure landscape images. I like to work with movement, facial expressions, body language, but also organic forms, free interpretation of botany and the animal kingdom.
TF: What are you currently working on?
MKJ: I have a lot of travel in connection with books and workshops this autumn, but I'm also working on one (or more) artist books that I want to print, as well as a silkscreen production.
TF: What does drawing mean to you and your work?
MKJ: The fast, intuitive pencil sketching is absolutely fundamental to everything I do, and how I develop and expand my visual universe. I constantly have wishes to work more analogically, as I don't like how much time I spend on the computer, but also see how drawing digitally, with a little less control than I have with a pencil, helps take the line in new directions .
TF: Finally, can you tell us a bit about your work in Tegnerforbundet's sales department?
MKJ: These are landscape images in a larger series of images that combine various elements that I return to in images, fantasy animals, mountains, and nature which is a mixture of inspiration from all over the world. They are painted with blue ink, which for me is somewhat associated with porcelain and old-fashioned craftsmanship.
