Trolls, trees and girls. That’s Ib Spang Olsen. A much loved and prolific artist, who’s long term partnership with Scandinavia’s king of literary nonsense, Halfdan Rasmussen, was to set the standard for children’s books throughout the last quarter of a century.
In his illustrations Letters have small feet, because as the artist says “I have never admired footless letters”. What he really thought of trolls we know little. His trees grow in their own directions. An women are round both front and rear. Anorexia is clearly a foreign concept in his drawing universe.
Overwhelmingly beautiful his illustration for the book ‘Nanette’ from 1965 is transcendent, of which he commented: Some of the more complicated positions I could simply not reconstruct, so I had to use myself as the one of the pair deploying an ingenious system of mirrors. You can enjoy the Nanette prints and a host of wonderful high quality children’s illustrations in our Ib Spang Olsen collection.
The above is an extract and rewrite of an article commenmorating Ib Spang Olsen’s 90th by Steffen Larsen
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