POPPING WITH COLOURS - Tekla Evelina Severin

There’s no escaping it. When you talk about Tekla Evelina Severin – a photographer, art designer, set designer and colourist based in Sweden – your world will be blown away with a multitude of bold, arresting colours. Tekla started her journey working as an interior architect in Stockholm and gradually transformed into a multidisciplinary artist easily identified by her penchant for bright, lively colours and minimalistic, eye-catching designs. Her vibrant work has led her to be counted as one of the top 200 influencers in her field – a feat that shouldn’t be regarded lightly! In a bid to find out about the inspiration behind her distinctive style, we talked to her all about colour addiction, architecture and photography. Excerpts:

- Tekla Evelina Severin

Although you started off as an interior architect in Stockholm in 2010, you now are a multidisciplinary artist who expresses herself through photography, art direction, set design and colour design. How did this evolution take place?

I took my Bachelor’s degree in interior architecture and furniture design at Konstfack University of Arts and Crafts, 2010. I had already started as a trainer at a small architecture studio in Stockholm then and soon I became an employee. The initial time period was very educative, but after some years I became very tired of the conformity of the Scandinavian style, blond wood, white, grey beige and the carrera marble that was so popular at that time. Combined with the long project processes and the non-visual and no hands on approach made me really crave after more creative processes, and at the least, colours and different perspectives!

It was also at that time when smartphones with pretty-okay cameras had hit the market, and I realised how much I had missed photographing (At high school I had an old analogue camera and I observed everything in the world through that lens). But now you could capture anything in a snap. It was also at that time when this new app called Instagram had launched. So that phone and app became my new creative platform, allowing me to take mobile photos with a lot of colour and things I usually didn’t get a chance to work with in everyday work life.

And the rest, as one would say, is history.

I took baby steps into the freelance life; working first 80% of the time then two days a week at the architect firm. Then in 2015, I started freelancing full-time. In my first job, I was paid with shoes as it was a content collaboration with a Canadian shoe company. Since then, things have went slowly and steadily upwards.