Open air (a sinistra) e Night (a destra)
When and how did you involve with art?
I remember when I was very young, my mother taught my brother and me how to paint dinosaurs in watercolor. It was incredibly exciting. Throughout my teens I would be playing music in bands or painting. Then after a brief flirtation with an academic university course (American Studies) I decided to study art. I have been studying art in London for six years which seems like a very long time.
Do exist any artist that represent a source of inspiration for the production of your paintings?
I tend to be just as influenced by authors and musicians as I am by other artists. When I make a painting, my aim is to capture a mood or atmosphere that is peculiar to the place I have travelled to. These places are often on the edges of wildernesses, Iceland, Spitsbergen and the French Alps for example. There are musicians from these areas (and others) that capture moods in their compositions that reflect these places beautifully and succinctly. Bands like Deathprod, Efterlang, Biosphere, Mum and Kronos Quartet are great inspirations to me when I am painting and I hope the compositions of my work reflect this music. Likewise, when I wish to paint a body of water I may look to the writings of Joseph Conrad, or when painting a Spitsbergen mountain range I will think back to the descriptions in Halldor Laxness's Independent People. One painter whose work I particularly enjoy is Michael Raedecker. There is a solitude and silence to his paintings that avoids being sentimental. He generally paints the landscapes without horizons. For me, this means I can wander around the monochrome worlds of garages, forests and theatres without ever hitting a boundary. The places he depicts are foreboding, but they resonate with such a golden hum that I cannot fail to be moved.
i black glasses e altre opere
How do you choose the subjects of your paintings? Do you always start from an event that you lived in the past, as it seems to happen in the paintings about your journey in Barenstberg, or do you have different way of choosing?
I decided after painting Eisler On The Go in the winter of 2006 that it was better for my work to paint things I had experienced first hand, rather than rely on found images. Eisler On The Go depicts an ice locked carousel in a car park.
This car park was in a canyon underneath a hostel I was staying in amongst the French Alps. I took the picture without thinking much of it. However when I got back to my studio in London I realised that solitary abandoned Carousel marooned on the edge of those beautiful mountains said something about my relationship with nature and living in a big city.
When I came to paint the scene I could feel that muddy/slushy snow and hear the soft creaking of the ski lifts. I think these experiences made it a better painting. So I believe it to be very important for my practice to travel to the places I want to paint. This is why I made the trip the Spitsbergen and then to the Russian mining town Barentsberg.
If you should indicate the most important aspect of your way of painting, what do you first think to?
The first thing that comes to mind is ambiguity. I want my paintings and my glass sculptures to have an openness and atmosphere that does not dictate to the viewer exactly what to think of when they look at my work. In a painting like Barensberg there are key signifiers to give the viewer hints in the right direction, but I want the viewer to bring his her own imagination to the work. Out of the abstract forms you can see a stage, a black pool of water, a flooded tree and some buildings.
When I made this painting I was thinking of ideas concerning climate change and how it was human inhabited areas that were perched on the edge of the melting Arctic that would be hardest hit. However, I believe everyone carries around with them their own paintings and when they see mine hopefully something triggers of an idea or memory that may involve climate change or flooding or may not.
In your paintings it is possible to find some traces of the landscapes of Constable and Turner, of the oniric world and the coulors of certain Russian Art, the paintings of Chagall for istance; Which are the artistic choices, both for the technique and the style, that you adopt to "mould" again some of this aspects, producing new works?
Out of those artists you mentioned I looked most closely at the Russian landscape artists of the 1800's. Artists like Arkhip Kuindzhi and Isaak Levitan featured in a show in the National Gallery in 2004 that I found very special. More so than Turner or Constable there is a bleakness and foreboding presence in the snow scenes and forests that says a great deal about the human condition without needing to paint humans. This is what I wanted to take into my work. By employing the dark/glassy pools of resin in my work I wished to create seductive spaces that draw the viewers gaze into the darkness and then allows certain forms to materialise out of the gloom. Akin to staring into a black mirror. Similar to Chagall, the colours I use have a hyper real seductive quality. You do not find these colours particularly prevalent in nature. Instead, I wanted my paintings to have an artificial feeling that talks about the photos and films still the paintings derived from and the notion of a dreamscape.
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