Not many people can pinpoint the day or the time they discovered their talent, but for artist Chrysa Koukoura, it was pretty simple.

“I was just like every other kid, until I picked up a fineliner,” she tells Neos Kosmos.

Her insanely intricate artwork which has become her signature is all down to what her pen pushes her to do on a stark white background.

She is able to create depth and shading by filling in lines and shapes, and creates huge geometric patterns that jump out of the page.

Always working with a white background and hundreds of black pens, she likes the challenge of not using colour. It’s a chance to really make a location or subject shine without the mask of colour getting in the way.

“I love the simplicity and the restrictiveness of working in black and white, as it requires me to bring something extra out of an image that wouldn’t usually be there had a colour been involved,” she says.

Inspiration comes from everything and everywhere for Chrysa, but like many artists, there is something intimidating about a blank canvas.
“It’s the hardest bit, starting a drawing,” she reveals.

“Sometimes, if I’m drawing something from observation, it’s just a case of sitting down and getting into it.

“With the patterns it just flows, I really don’t know how to explain it, it just comes out.”

Her work isn’t simple, nor is it easy to make up your mind about. You can’t simply view her work from a distance; you have to get up close, study small sections of it to reveal the drawing’s true heart.

The patterned work she does, for lack of better words, looks like an extreme version of the doodling so many do when they’re on the phone.

You can see how it builds, but can never really find the starting point.

Chrysa now lives in Melbourne, moving from England in February, setting up shop after feeling a little stilted at home.

Born in Greece and having moved to England when she was eight, she’s been always fascinated by changing scenery.

In October last year, she was in Greece in her familial haunts in Chios, taking in the views and putting pen to paper.

Her artwork, Lindos, that came out of that trip is breathtaking. Jutting out on a small cliffside, the village of Lindos springs out, houses stacked side by side, one on top of the other, with overlying powerlines dancing around the town.

Zooming in, you see tiny bits of daily life; someone’s washing on the line, umbrellas out on sunny decks and satellite disks perched on the roof.
“It’s from the roof of my cousins’ restaurant,” Chrysa says.

“I sat there in October, when you can kind of sit there in the afternoon and not bake to death, and I spent over three or four days drawing the view.”

She goes back to Greece almost every year, to take in the new scenery and see how it changes with time.

When she was at school, art always had the lion’s share of her heart, but mathematics also was a keen interest.

Her use of geometric shapes and stark straight lines shows how much she still respects the controlled nature of maths. As much as she is defined by her fineliner, the ruler she uses makes up a huge part of her work.

Struggling with such intricate details, there must be times where a line has gone astray and ruined a drawing.

But Chrysa says it doesn’t happen all the time, and in fact, the artworks where things have gone wrong have been some of the most interesting to develop.

“Because it’s in black pen, something that you stuff up you can turn it into something else because I never have a full plan of what I want something to look like,” she says.

“I’ll have a rough idea, but then you just improvise, with a mistake you can just improvise.”

“I’ve never ruined something to the extent that it’s catastrophic.”

Her artwork has captured the eyes of many, with her client work growing exponentially.

She’s worked for multiple apparel companies, including New Zealand’s Icebreaker to create patterns for their clothing, she’s created artwork for music records and has even illustrated bird wigs for MAGMA books.

Working for Fat Cat Records in the UK, she created special vinyl editions of the albums the company released. She even used a bit of colour to supplement them, something she says she still has “an aversion” to.

The cover to Honeyblood’s ‘Killer Bags’ features a prominent red apple, dripping with Chrysa’s black fineliner.

You can tell there’s a bit of a reluctance to follow a brief, but she does like not having to start from scratch.

“It’s quite nice being a bit restricted, because it makes it more of a challenge,” she says of her clients’ work.

“If you sit down with a blank piece of paper you can draw anything, it’s a bit overwhelming deciding what to draw.”

What Chrysa likes to do with her art is make it accessible. She doesn’t want to see her artwork just gawked at by the artsy types in a gallery.

You’ll find her setting up stalls in every design market she comes across, talking to locals, encouraging people to look for the detail in her work.

She loves seeing people do a double take when they come across her work.

While many artists would have an aneurysm if their work was copied, she chooses to make cards, posters and books of her work, offering both the originals and prints to give all people – whatever their budget- a chance to have a Chrysa illustration of their own.

She works on small and large scale works at any one time, and with the secrets of Melbourne to uncover, she has a lot of new inspiration.

Let’s hope she can keep her pen and pencil supply up to scratch to deal with the demand.

“They do run out pretty quickly,” she chuckles.

You can see Chrysa Koukoura most Saturdays at the Rose Street Artist Market, Rose St, North Fitzroy and she will be at the Melbourne Design Market at Level 3, Federation Square, Corner Flinders and Swanston Streets 10.00 am to 5.00 pm on Sunday 20 July. To find out more and to buy Chrysa’s work directly, visit chrysakoukoura.com