What Petra Eriksson Sees

You can make gray feel honest enough, call it the real world unadorned and serious. But spend too long there and honest starts feeling like defeat.

Petra Eriksson is an illustrator from Barcelona who works for magazines like Refinery29, The Sunday Telegraph, and Lucky Peach. Her weapon of choice is color—not subtly, not in a balanced palette, just a lot of it. She paints portraits of public figures and ordinary subjects in explosions of magenta and lime and cobalt, color combinations that shouldn’t work but do. Michelle Obama rendered in neon, Martin Luther King Jr. in electric hues, musicians and food and random people glowing like they were lit from inside.

The colors don’t feel real, but they feel true. There’s something about seeing a face rendered this way that makes you actually look at it instead of sliding past the way you’ve learned to do. You can’t ignore color like that.

I work in design, so I notice the technical choices—how she uses flat shapes, how she builds compositions that hold together even when the palette has no business working. It’s confident work. But what gets to me is something less technical. Her work feels like an argument against the gray. Not an argument for cheerfulness or optimism or any of that easy stuff. An argument that how we represent things matters. That color isn’t decoration—it’s how you make people pay attention.

There’s something almost stubborn about it. A refusal to accept that the world has to look the way we’ve been trained to see it. Or maybe she’s just better at seeing than the rest of us.