BIOGRAFI · BACKGROUND · LIFE AS A DRAWING ARTIST · WORKING TOGETHER
TEA BENDIX · born 1970 · is a Danish illustrator, author, graphic designer and live drawing performer, based in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Danish School of Design and works across different media, including picture books, non-fiction, apps, children’s radio and drawings for TV as well as concerts that combine drawings and visual narratives in collaboration with dancers or orchestras.
EDUCATION · The Design School in Kolding (Graphic Design and Illustration) 1993. Graduation from the Danish School of Design (Department of Visual Communication) 1996. Education as an author of Children’s books at the Center for Children’s Literature, Copenhagen, 2001. Own office since 1998. About the author: >Forfatterweb
A CROSS-AESTETIC FIELD OF WORK
I create text, illustrations and design for children’s books and non-fiction. I work cross-media, always ready to work in other ways of telling stories: e-books, children’s radio, children’s theater, PR, concerts and workshops, exhibitions, communication, lectures and live drawing.
Possibilities are constantly emerging in the new media and in recent years I have become interested in how to use drawings and visual narratives as live performance / drawing concert in collaboration with dancers or orchestras. I investigate ways to work choreographically with the drawings, explore the interaction on stage and investigate the impulses the music can give to the drawings and vice versa. It is an interesting discipline as different types of music and collaborations give completely new kinds of drawings every time!
In the past year, I created drawings for TV and have learned to work with my drawings in After Effects, a completely new way for me to think about illustration.
PROCES
Illustrating is for me a proces of listening more than drawing. It is about being present with a text or a story with all the senses awake. On stage, it happens lightning fast. At the drawing board I need time.
When I begin a new task, I always spend a lot of time talking to my client. I try all my best to forget what I know already. I focus on writing and sensing what is at stake, how could the expression be, what medium is the right one to use. Then I begin to draw or create some visual elements. Its always a mixture of endless doubt and feeling amused, tossing and turning the theme, filling the wall with sketches, selecting drawings, scanning some of them, trying things out in Illustrator and Photoshop. Little by little things are growing. I constantly test the interplay between the text and illustration in the layout (that’s why I prefer to do the bookdesign myself). It feels like modeling, or laying a huge puzzle and it’s important for me to follow the whole proces and that all the details around the book are well connected, ... because my projects tend to develop into new things and other medias.
My talks are about the love for books, the handcraft and the creative proces.
MEMBER OF
Design Denmark
Association for Book Crafts
Danish Authors' Society
The illustratorers in Danish Authors' Society
AND
Mother of three
Dancing historical dances in > Anello
CUSTOMERS
I do books for the publishing houses Gyldendal, Lindhardt & Ringhof, Carlsen, Eksistensen and Politiken Publishing, PR for Theatre My, Theatre Kriskat, Theatre Frøken Fracasos Compagni and Danish Author's Society, workshops at Kulturværftet Helsingør og Nikolai for children, illustrations for Danish Dementia Research Centre, Historieselskabet og Blixen Award, children's radio for Danish Radio P2, exhibitions at Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen Cathedral and Nicolai for Children and I go on stage with Emil de Waal and Spejderrobot, Thomas Sandberg and Steen Håkon Hansen, Concerto Copenhagen, Krudtuglejazz, Moussa Diallo and Dawda Jobarteh, Benita Haastrup and Katrine Suwalsky, Ayi Solomon, Sille & Palle m. fl.
WORKING TOGETHER
When we do projects together we make a special agreement
but for all projects I refer to the copyright law
and my terms and conditions below:
Tea Bendix draws images that slide directly into the emotions. Her drawings are reminiscent of something one might have forgotten
Bendix' delicate fine lines have a nerve that brings the image to life and lifts the emotionally saturated characters from the page and brings life to them
Any way, I have never experienced anything like what Tea Bendix presented under the headline: Can one draw funk? Together with her small band of collaborating musicians, Sille Grønberg and Palle Windfeldt, she performed a series of drawings on a glass plate, lines and dots, which swung all the way out into Køge Bay, so that no eye or butt was dry. It is one of the coolest things you can experience in the world of the picture, when everything goes up in a higher unit
Tea Bendix can draw - I mean really draw, so it goes directly into your heart
