1506-310714, 59°18° This winter Fredrik and Marie Westin proposed I use their un-used basement TV den in Gustavsberg, Sweden as a studio. After warning them that having a painter around, even if a good friend, could be a pain in the ass, as well as a mess, I agreed to try it out and we sort of left it at that. Mid-June I showed up with my tools, we bashed the parquet floors with an old musky boatyard tarp, bought some paint and I set to work. As usual with painting, there were up days and down, periods of frenetic activity and others of catatonic staring. Little by little the walls of the studio filled up, and the work started to leak out into the rest of the house. There was no preconception, I needed a place to work and they were open to living in the middle of it. Its a rare for most people to experience the incredible period of creation, when the work is alive and uncertain, when at any moment I could go too far and end up trashing what seemed fabulous only moments before, when for days a painting would go nowhere dejected on the sidelines only to be resurrected upside down into a new direction. On Fredriks birthday we had a combination party/opening - their friends and mine, potato salad, italian sausages, cakes, beer and wine - it was a blast! In a speech Fredrik referred to a long discussion we had had a week before about what art did to a living space, and what having an artist around did to family life. In swedish the word for artist is kostnär, and the word for confusion is a very close konstigt - art can be a welcome mess to normality, living with an artist can be a welcome disruption of routine. See EXHIBITIONS in LIONNI.COM for more...
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:48:32 +0000
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