Couture & Nature

Inger Lonmo & Maja Kihlstedt

I've been drawing all my life. My inspiration comes from my love of fashion and the art deco era, as well as the old silent film stars. I embellish my drawings with feathers, sequence, ribbons etc. I hope my whimsical pictures will make you smile and feel happy. Inger

I have come to be endlessly fascinated by the minuscule in nature and in discovering how much information it holds with its intricate and complex structures and patterns. Nature has inspired my work but also an increasing feeling of how fragile and vulnerable our “natural” world is. Maja

Inger Lonmo

A former fashion model, Inger was born on the island of Føynland, outside of Tønsberg, Norway. She is an autodidact, has drawn all her life. As a child she made paper dolls for herself and all her friends. She loved clothes and the old movie stars she saw in her mother's albums. As a teenager she drew colouring books and gave as gifts, and painted scenery for school's theatre performances.

She has had several exhibitions in Norway and New York, have sold handmade cards and brooches in small speciality shops, she has made covers of Playbills, had her drawings published in books, and enjoyed commissions for brides for their thank you cards. She enjoyed seeing her artwork, a sun, on the TV program CBS Sunday morning. Inger felt very honored a few years ago when she was asked to be part of a small exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring amateur/semi-professional artists.

She has created 3-D business cards for companies, and had the pleasure of making congratulatory cards for both the Norwegian and Danish Crown Princes for their weddings. She lives in New York and spend summers in Tønsberg.

Maja Kihlstedt

Maja Kihlstedt was born in Sweden 1952. She grew up in an artistic family where art was a life long passion more than a career choice. Both her parents were artists that met at Otto Sköld’s Art school in Stockholm in the early 50s.

In 1977 she moved to New York from Copenhagen where she studied at the Danish Art Academy from 1973-1977. She continued her studies at the New York Studio School 1977-1979 with Nicolas Carone, Leland Bell, George McNeil, Mercedes Matter, and Esteban Vincente. As a recipient of the Battel-Stoekel scholarship, she attended Yale University Summer School for Music and Art in 1979. This was followed by fellowships to Yaddo, the McDowell Colony, Millay, and the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, 1981 - 1983, among others.

Her media is drawing, printmaking, and water-based media.

She likes to focus on the organic world, and often on such seemingly insignificant plants as tiny weeds and other organisms. It has made her even more acutely aware of the fragility but also the wonder of our ecosystem. To her observations, they look also strangely familiar of other structures, even manmade ones, like spheres, cathedrals domes, and architecture.

Maja has exhibited nationally as well as internationally including at Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen, Stockholm International Art Fair, Gallery Bergman, Stockholm, Sweden 1998 and 2001, Cortland Jessup Gallery, NYC, Sakai City Museum, Japan, Contemporary Int’l dell’Arte, Florence, the AAF ArtFair, NYC with Gallery Galou, Alvesta Konsthall, Ljungbro Konsthall, Sweden, Gallery Eva Solvang, Stockholm, Sweden, and was recently the winner of Jason McCoy Gallery Drawing Challenge online XII, 2020, and included in the publication Artists During The Pandemic 2020, edited by Cosima Ene, 2020.

Her work is in private and corporate collections.

Currently, Maja divides her time between New York City and the Catskills.

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