Danish Poster Art: Travel, Place, and Illustration
Updated: Oct 15
Looking at Danish travel posters as an illustrator: the scenes, compositions, and details that hold my attention.
Growing up, I knew my great-granduncle Aage Rasmussen had designed travel posters for DSB. I’m also related to Erik Stockmarr—Stockmarr is my middle name—and his work is associated with circus posters. Those were family facts. The posters were around in books, on walls, and in old portfolios, long before I thought of Danish poster art as something to study.
Years later, I began drawing travel scenes of my own. Looking at my railway-station illustration beside older posters, I started thinking about how an image can suggest a journey without showing everything that happens along the way.
What a Travel Poster Has to Do
A travel poster has a practical job: to make a place recognizable and give someone a reason to go there. It has to do that with a limited set of choices—the viewpoint, the main shapes, the color, perhaps a train, a station, or a stretch of coastline.
The Danish poster art I return to often gives those choices room. A platform, a road between trees, or a few figures waiting can establish the scene without filling every corner. The setting carries much of the image.
The Danish Railway Museum’s page for Aage Rasmussen’s 1937 DSB express-train poster offers one example of the travel imagery I have in mind. It also gives some historical context for his work.
Looking at My Railway-Station Drawing
When I drew the station, I was interested in the relationships between the parts of the scene: the locomotive, the tracks, the station buildings, and the people waiting. The train gives the composition its center. The figures and buildings give it scale.
I wasn’t trying to recreate a particular poster. I wanted to draw a station as a place people pass through, with the small pauses and encounters that happen alongside the journey.
Drawing was part of family life, too. My mother brought home sketches from trips to Greenland. My grandmother studied illustration and knew the Danish illustrator Ib Andersen as a student. No one set out to teach me a family style; drawing was simply one of the things that existed alongside music, books, and conversation.
From the Station to the Landscape
The same questions come up when I draw a landscape. Where does the eye enter the image? What holds it there? Which details help the place feel specific?
In the late-summer drawing here, the path leads through the scene, while the fence and trees give it structure. It is a different subject from a railway station, but I’m working through a similar problem: arranging a few clear elements so the viewer can understand the place and imagine what lies beyond the frame. That is what keeps me looking at Danish poster art. I’m interested in the decisions behind the image—what gets included, what gets left out, and how the composition guides the eye. Those questions are part of how I approach my own illustrations.
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