For much of her adult life, Margrethe Odgaard has been on a vision quest.
Over the years, the Danish designer and textile artist has created colors to enhance the wares of many well-known and prestigious brands, including Apple, IKEA and the high-end Danish furniture maker Montana, and has advised architects in the use of color in their buildings.
After studying textile making at the Royal Danish Academy and the Rhode Island School of Design, Odgaard traveled and worked all over the world and tried to define the distinctive colors preferred in various places, by different cultures. She started painting the colors she saw in a set of notebooks she calls her color diaries. One of the first entries featured the colors she saw under a sink on a visit to Japan. “There was a tube wrapped in mint green and one in a light rose, and there was a turquoise knob,” she said. “I marveled at it, thinking of this common industry that chose these as fitting colors.”
She then looked homeward, to speak of her own country’s particular palette, in her 2019 book, “Shades of Light,” which she has described as a “collection of colors that come into their own in the delicate intensity of Nordic light.”