I‘ve designed and illustrated for various clients, to name a few: Tiltworks USA, Element Skateboards USA, Pale Cloud Swe, Bee production, Swe
Pantagruel Publishing Norway

Hi, I’m Anneli. Let me tell you about how CoG came to be.

City of Girls happened organically and sneakily. The story goes like this:
Artist becomes mother. Becomes overwhelmed. Cue family illness and cancer scares, moving from a capital to a small town outside of capital, and hey how’s work going? The answer to that is obviously ‘not great’ or even more truthful as in; I didn’t find time to shower in a week how was I supposed to get work done?

But I got family back in health, albeit it took a few years, and the kids grew strong and meals were cooked. Over all a great success. But what did the outside art industry see? An artist becoming a ghost, popping up randomly showing strange doodles instead of sophisticated splashes of ink.

And as time went by and time to do art started to seep in the doodles stayed, at first hidden in journals but then creeping into a canvas hiding in the back of the studio (but moved to the kitchen table where the kids were running around as I was painting).

I realized the characters in the windows I kept drawing had so much more to say. I needed a city. No. I needed many cities.

Enter City Of Girls. The story of my soul. The love song to my working class family. The goodbye to dreams I had to let go, and a stubborn hello to a never ending hope things will get better. Something sweet, salty and most definitely tart – wrapped up in visual poetry.

When I told my writer friend David Kalal about how CoG came to be he summed it up quite eloquently:

Mess is like the primordial soup … All life emerges from it.

These days I put that quote everywhere. It sums up my life and work delightfully.

Fine Arts studies- one semester