For Anne-Britt Kristiansen, the pull towards creativity started early. “When I was young, I often got up at night to draw after I had been sent to bed,” she tells us. And that pull has been a consistent force throughout Anne-Britt’s whole life.

Led by her own curiosity, Anne-Britt left home at the age of nineteen to explore the world. In the United States, she met an older Russian artist—whose wonderful stories and home full of art books became an important moment on her path to being the artist she is today. Then, after several years working in Norwegian media and TV, she set off for Cuba, this time to meet a political artist. “I had a desire to find out if I was a good photographer—not necessarily whether I could take good photos, technically speaking, but rather if I could take my interactions with people and capture their stories in my photographs.”

This journey marked the start of Anne-Britt’s artistic career. She left her full-time media job to study art at Oslo Interdisciplinary Art Institute (DTK), allowing her to explore art as a medium to convey and touch without words. “Only a few days after starting my studies at DTK, I knew art was what I wanted to pursue. I realised that, finally, this is where I was meant to be.”

Anne-Britt credits her multitude of experiences and journeys as elements that have built who she is as an artist. She finds her art to be influenced by the people she has met on her journeys, from former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she worked for as a photographer, to the Dalai Lama. These people have amplified Anne-Britt’s interest in the interactions between people, which shines through in her art.

“The connection between people is my driving force,” she says. That’s why she has also worked with Clowns Without Borders, whose mission is to help children affected by conflict to heal through play. Having always been passionately against injustice, Anne-Britt seeks to tell and recreate the stories of diverse people and children through her art.

But her desire to tell stories is mixed with a unique artistic practice. When creating, she’s inspired, she says, by her grandchildren’s unafraid way of being. As a result, Anne-Britt’s artistic practice “follows intuition rather than reason.” And, rather than trying to control the medium she works with, she rather lets it guide her. “There are many elements of randomness in the way I work. What colours am I today? It’s all about surrendering yourself, surrendering control, and collaborating more with the paint and the colours.”

There’s a lot of emotion captured in Anne-Britt’s paintings, often due to a painting’s openness to the viewer’s own interpretation. “By building my paintings up in layers, painting over things, removing and adding them, I’m able to show fragments or parts of something,” Anne-Britt says.

“The viewer can then find their own meaning in the visual story. I hint at scenes they might remember seeing or experiencing, forgotten moments, or unclear memories. Through using broken and blurred lines, and by rearranging the order of elements, I alternate between the inner and outer experience. It’s through this alternation that I find a balance between the abstract and the figurative.”

When asked about her ideal customer, Anne-Britt says, “my ideal customer is the person I’m able to touch through my work.” She wants to find and convey the beautiful in the sad—in the things that we think of as different or ugly. “It’s this search that has become my story, and it’s this story that I want to tell through my art. It’s closely related to my need to convey without words; to recreate, transform, touch.” She finds pride in many of her artworks, not necessarily because she finds them beautiful, but because they have had the ability to affect people who have emotionally connected with her work.

Although she has held exhibitions in London, Berlin, Oslo and beyond, Anne-Britt, like many of us, still struggles with the fear of failure. “In the future I want to get even braver, take more space, and yell even louder as a female artist. I want to take the doubt of ‘am I really an artist?’ and use it for something positive.”