Omslagsbild:
Hardy Brix – Couverwille Island, Antarktis, 15x22cm
The compass points at the North – Watercolours by Hardy Brix
By Peter V Nielsen
Hardy Brix studied at the Aarhus Art Academy. He started to paint watercolours in 1980 after his schooling. From the very beginning, watercolours were connected with travel experiences, and even if there today are big similarities betwen his watercolour and oil painting, the watercolours were never models for oil painting in the studio. Hardy Brix´s trips went to northern Norway, thereafter to Svalbard in 1998, to Greenland in 1999 and then to the Antarctic in 2001. He paints many pictures during a watercolour trip. Swiftness is important. He never returns to a watercolour in the evening, or when he comes back home in order to correct it. It is spontaneity that counts. When you paint watercolours under such risky conditions, as the ones Hardy Brix uses, it may be difficult to get the quite sublime effects that the watercolour technique can create with wet in wet effects. It often goes fast, down to half a minute, and the watercolour paintings therefore hold a rawness in colours and form, made with a relatively dry brush and distance between some of the coloured fields.
Agneta Ljungberg
By Lasse Sandström
Agneta Ljungberg is the architect from Lund who paints in watercolours when she has some extra time. She does it with great skill. Most of the painting is carried out in the summer in her studio at Mellbystrand, in Dalsland and sometimes, in the autumn or spring, in Provence. She finds watercolour painting of use to her as an architect and sometimes also the motifs coincide. In the studies of the houses from Provence she lifts out the souls of the old, magnificently simple houses with shades fetched from the sun-bleached range of colours of Provence. What fascinates her above all is the mixture of the superrealistic and abstract, the large-scale and at the same time the small-scale. – I find it extremely exciting. There are so many interpretations of the pictures. They invite to be seen as landscapes, tree formations, mountain ranges or water edges with stones and water flashes. The female bodies and the landscapes are painted with a lot of water. Agneta Ljungberg uses the brush sparingly, mainly to steer the flows of water, and directs the process as the pigments begin to stabilize themselves.
Bertil Berg
By Jacqueline Stare
Fire and ice, heat, coolness, cold versus glowingly warm colours. Bertil Berg likes to work with contrasts in colours, affects as well as formats. For Bertil Berg it is a question of painting for the painting´s own sake. Painting is his medium in order to tell what he is filled with. It is through his pictures that he seeks contact and he wants them to be loaded, loaded with some kind of “magic”, i.e., a content that affects the onlooker. The knowledge of nature and macro as well as microcosmos and a will to express feelings are some of the basic pillars in his painting, an intense commitment on different levels. He wants the pictures to speak for themselves, he wants us, who see them, to be able to make our own interpretations in front of them. It is not a question of translating the picture in the right or wrong words but to get a feeling of the content starting from the exerpiences and personality of each onlooker, isn´t it. Bertil Berg draws us into his anxiey and sorrows through his artistry. He actually forces his awareness upon us if we want to receive it. But he also gives us solace and hope. www.bertilberg.se
Johan Lamm
By Jacqueline Stare
When Johan Lamm, as an architect, started in earnest to concentrate on his painting in the 1990´s, he studied for different artists in Italy, France and the USA. In Sweden he also belongs to the large group who have participated in trips and courses with Arne Isacsson as a leader. In the pictures from mainly the early nineties, Johan Lamm was still in a realistic painting but he has very deliberately worked himself away from that towards a stronger and stronger abstraction. Of course he is influenced, among other things, by nature. He lives just next to the water in Marstrand on the Swedish West Coast. Johan Lamm paints very freely, tests different colours, carves, scrapes and cuts in his pictures. He creates signs, a kind of language of his own that he sometimes uses. He has always wanted to deepen his knowledge on various levels. It has then been of interest also to be a student of artists from different countries and to let his own Nordic foundation meet South European and American experiences, theories and ways of working. He has also cooperated with other acquarellists as far as different experiments and investigations of the various qualities of the watercolour technique are concerned, of pigments and admixtures of different kinds.