Omslagsbild:
Margaretha Bååth – Vitsippa X4, 20x8cm, 2008
Margaretha Bååth
By Jacqueline Stare
There are not many who master the very special botanical flower- painting technique today, but one of them in Sweden who does is Margaretha Bååth. She wanted to become an artist from the very beginning but her parents were of the opinion that she had to have a proper vocational background. She thus got herself not only one but several different professions (electrical engineer, physician specialized in thorax radiology, amateur geologist) and all have given her varying experiences and knowledge being of use in her artistry. She has moreover a, for a Swedish aquarellist, very unusual education from the Kew School of Botanical Illustration in England. Even if Margaretha Bååth has always painted it was in 1987 that she started to take a serious interest in watercolour painting and devoted a summer, with the help of a textbook in watercolour painting, to study the technique step by step. Today, Margaretha Bååth is that skilled in her painting that she can work faster than when she started her botanical pictures. To work with botanical pictures requires a quite special feeling where time and place disappear, a condition that many creative persons share with her, irrespective of what they work with.
Morten Eriksen
By Jacqueline Stare
Morten Eriksen was to have been 90 years old in June 2010 but, because of illness, he suddenly passed away just a few months before his birthday. Morten Eriksen?s great interest in life was to paint in watercolours. He documented town and landscape, nature and animal life whereever he went in the world during his many trips. He was a constant traveller, always supplied with watercolours and paper. Morten Eriksen was on the permanent staff of the Århus Municipality as a landscape architect for 33 years. He retired at the age of 60 and then got the possibility to devote himself wholeheartedly to the watercolour painting that he loved for almost three decades. His painting is realistic, observing, illustrating and detailed. Seen with modern eyes, it is to many somewhat old-fashioned and neat and therefore probably also soothingly nostalgic.
Wiwian Tuuri
By Jacqueline Stare
From the beginning, Wiwian Tuuri painted mainly in oil, but gradually the interest in watercolour painting became predominant. It was a tough decision, not least for the economy, to start to devote herself to her artistic work and it took moreover ten years before she finally dared to show her works and have her first exhibition in 1981. Since then she has had innumerable exhibitions all over Sweden. Wiwian Turi has many greatly differing interests and that reflects also in her world of motifs which lacks a red thread. If not the red thread exactly is the spontaneous emotional relationship to the motifs! Many pictures are about love and different relationships in a preferably light scale of colours and of late she has started more and more to interest herself in depicting faces. Through the years, nature has been an important source of inspiration and she is very interested in botany. Painting, nature and music are three firmly connected parts in her life.
Jörgen Landehag
By Kelly Lindblom
Light is the alpha and omega for Jörgen Landehag, the motif is secondary to the very depiction of light. He prefers to paint outdoors, sometimes from memory. Parallell with his “inborn impressionism”, as Arne Isacsson called it, Jörgen Landehag works as a pediatrician. The children in the hospital ward inspire him. He draws together with them and through their drawings he gets their “help” to find out how things are. “They cannot perhaps talk about what troubles them, but they can draw figures, without arms”, he says.