interview with graphic artist katrin olina

we recently spoke to katrin olina, an illustrator and graphic designer based in reykjavik.

DB: please could you tell us about your background and how you came to be a designer / illustrator?
KO: I’m a graphic artist from iceland. drawing was always my first tool of choice because it is so instant and so close to the truth. my interests have always been wide ranging, I studied product design, but I was drawn to the world of natural sciences and mythology and this is how I began to make illustrations. it was through collaborations with other designers and companies that I began to apply my drawings to products and spaces. I’m still working in this way although my focus has in recent years been on research and forms of storytelling.

eulenspiegel mural at rykjavik art museum

eulenspiegel mural at rykjavik art museum

DB: how would you describe your work to someone who hasn’t seen it before?
KO: illustrated imagined worlds depicting narratives around mythical beings and primitive nature.

DB: what has been the biggest singular influence on your work?
KO: nature and the internet.

DB: which mediums and materials do you enjoy working with the most?
KO: I work with drawing and like to see how the things I draw can be translated into other mediums. I‘d love to work with sound for example.

illustrations from ‘nott story’

DB: which project have you enjoyed working on the most to date?
KO: I’ve been working on a project for the past four years. its a research project that explores forms of storytelling. its a process that is still developing. it is definitely the most difficult and exciting thing I’ve worked on.

DB: what do you know now that you wish you knew when you were a teenager?
KO: that everything tends to follow a pattern.

DB: what areas of your work are you hoping to explore in 2014?
KO: I’m learning new skills, personal and work related. after taking things apart it is time to put them together in a new order. to coagulate as the alchemists described it.

subplant, national gallery oslo

official poster for nordisk panorama five cities film festival

crystal bar murals, hong kong, in collaboration with michael young

DB: what do you do to keep your ideas fresh?
KO: listen to ‘in our time’ with melvyn bragg on BBC radio 4. I highly recommend it. last week they talked about the eye.

DB: do you have any superstitious beliefs?
KO: I’m responsible for my part. the rest is up to the universe.

katrin olina’s website

poster and flyer for montreux jazz festival

DB: what’s the last thing that made you say ‘wow’?
KO: a few good wows are mandatory each day. today a friend and a mentor sent me this meditation from r.m. rilke. it is from a collection of letters to a young poet.

‘works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.

everything is gestation and then birthing. to let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unspeakable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating’ – from: letters to a young poet – r.m. rilke