The Street

My works of last winter examine the relationships between people and space. This is the theme I intend to continue working on in the near future. For me it is a new direction or, at least, new viewpoint, in representing man and space. These pictures revive my childhood memories of heavy snowfalls over 10 years ago with people tumbling their way through snow blocking the roads.

I attempted to depict the quiet of winter landscapes in the paintings, using last years heavy snowing as inspiration. In the silent and empty, snow-covered country human figures appear, too, but remain unidentified. Who are they? Where do they come from? What for? Where do they go? It is for the fantasy of the viewer to find the answers. My purpose with this is to create a special atmosphere: an imagery, dreamlike world is brought to life in the pictures, a world into which one can easily project past, present, and future.

These winter landscapes evoke contradictory feelings. On the on hand, they reproduce homely and intimate late winter afternoons, where everything looks as if watched through the window of one’s home. On the other hand, they are haunted by some sort of emptiness or menacing bleakness that is imposed by a motionless, almost dead nature; as if the sleep of winter was only a hair’s width away from the eternal slumber. The figures that appear in this environment are similarly contradictory: realistic and unrealistic at the same time. The paintings show real sights: naked trees, roads, clearings, and meadows covered in snow. We are at the edge of a town, where nature begins. What we see is the everyday reality of winter with its snow-blocked and ice-clad road and people suffering from virus inflicted disease. And yet the sight is stirring, there is some mystery to it. It may be the mysticism of late winter afternoons when all is covered in white and one feels to be all alone, standing there facing nature whose power and mysteriousness is beyond human comprehension.

In my coming works I wish to continue contemplating the relationships between figure and space, further elaborating the ways in which man and his surroundings, nature and man-made environments are related (e.g The Street).