My new studio: "Roen" Boathouse : About finding the aura of play!

Directly on the beach, about 30 min outside Tromsø, Northern Norway I have found my sanctuary. A beautiful sky blue boathouse fittingly named "The Calm"("Roen"). Once filled with nets, oars, and motor oil, I have transformed the space into a place of creation, reflection, and storytelling through my artistic practice. Here I can play, and see nature play out around me.

To be able to work during the harsh northern winters I newly finished insulating and putting fresh pinewood panel on the walls inside. It can now serve as my studio all year. The smell is a mix of freshly installed wood, seaweeds and saltwater. The sounds are the creaking of the floor, and waves brushing against the sand. And the view is the midnight sun over the ocean or the flickering northern lights across the fjord through my windows.

Out here I am alone, relaxed and focused. I have been waiting for years to have my own space where I can escape to devote my time solely to creating. I feel so privileged to be here now! I can`t wait to properly get started with my work while the light shift through the palette of northern blues and arctic greys.

In the boathouse I can devote my time to my mission; finding an aura of play.

At home I have two boys age 9 and 11. (Along with my incredible french baker-man, a cat, a dog, a station wagon and all that jazz). I absolutely adore them and my life with them! It is full of joy and wonder! In fact, my two boys are my main source of inspiration. Their curiosity and freedom when they create is something I aspire to adopt into my own art, where, more often than I wish, my inner critique often gets the best of me.

Children`s creative processes have a sense of immediacy about them. They don`t stop to reflect upon an idea before trying it out. They just do, creating with the help of intuition rather than intellectual thought.

I can see the irony in having drowned my inspiration in thoughts about how to break out of a kind of intellectual entrapment, when what I should have been doing was just create. No expectations, no pressure. Just an idea, and the doing...

I find that the search for this type of free expression has been the single most compelling driving force in my art practice over the last decade. I have been dabbling in different techniques that allow me to be free of the learned handcraft of my education. I join my children in their playfulness and have, among other things, been making handcrafted sculptures with simple materials like clay, sand, papier-mâché and playdough.

I have done a lot of blind drawing and drawings with my left hand, and have found other ways of abstracting my visual expression. For example I have been using collage a lot to get a more abstracted yet textural feel on the paintings. Still, I have not been able to keep the inspiration steady and flowing over time. This is, of course, partly because of the neccessary time spent on responsibilities outside of being an artist, but mostly because I have not had a stable studio space. But now, finally, I have my own space in the boathouse to practice longterm. This is one of the most exiting happenings of my life!

In the wintermounths I expect the boathouse will help me also in regards of a general lack of energy that comes with the darkness here in the north. Because believe it or not; play also takes up energy. There are days when I am too tired, and my mind keeps falling back into analytical thought rather than just being in the moment. On those days I might find it better to not create at all. I have my home office to work on the online gallery FunFace Brothers, or I will often take a walk along the shore with my Staffordshire Bullterrier Lucy. Rather that pushing it, I just let the inspiration come to be. Looking for seachells and other treasures on the beautiful beach.

Even though I think the landscape here is magical and it is continuously inspirational in terms of colours and textures, My subject matter has always been people. I most often turn my attention towards the inner landscapes of humans; the human condition.

If you ask me which artists from history inspire me, I would say it is those who focus on the human condition alongside a strong tendency toward playfulness and honesty in their practices. It is difficult to name only one or two, as there have been so many, particularly in the last 100 years.

However, if I had to choose, I would first mention Francis Bacon, who is renowned for his unsettling, visceral depictions of the human condition. Both in his heavily distorted faces and in his eary sceneries. Secondly I would like to include Jean Dubuffet, who made playful sculptures that challenged traditional standards of beauty by using unorthodox, raw materials. Dubuffet was also inspired by children's creative work. He coined the term "Art Brut", or as it is often called in english, "Ousider Art." He believed that unrefined, self-taught artists, such as psychiatric patients and other social outcasts who operated completely outside the boundaries and traditions of the official art world, were creating the most interesting and inspirational work.

Although Bacon was not involved in the Art Brut movement itself. But he, like the Art Brut movement, made art in the post-WWII era. He was highly conscious of and influenced by art history, yet he rejected the polite, academic "beauty" of traditional art in favor of something primal, chaotic, and unfiltered. Truly reflecting the time he lived in.

In the future, I will be posting and writing about other interesting artists (both the living and the deceased).

It is so wonderful how these artists in many ways "broke the mold" and gave us fresh new perspectives. I hope that you will be able to find some of the rawness that both Bacon and Dubuffet harnessed in my work.

When I create I embrace the imperfections and the fragility of the human mind by abstracting the face to a greater or lesser degree. I love the chaotic, unfiltered and borderline ugly. To protect my playfullness against my inner critique, I need to redefine what a good creation is. I look for the primitive, the bizarre and the imperfect.

Still, when the creation is done, I would look at it with more critical eyes and question its strengths. It is only this way I can evolve and not risk making uninteresting art.

This friction between the critique and the child is what makes my work interesting.

Look foreward to showing you my work from the boathouse. Stay tuned.