Sara Lundberg
by Maria Molin
For the last 25 years Sara Lundberg has concentrated her art work on picture books – and for the last 15 years she has been an author as well as an illustrator. When creating pictures, she works with watercolour all the way from sketches to the original. She likes the unpredictable nature of the medium. In 2025 she was awarded the Children & Young People’s Literature Prize from the Nordic Council for her picture book “Ingen utom jag” (No-one but me). She always has her camera with her and takes lots of photographs for inspiration. She often bases her characters on live models and will start making quick sketches in watercolour with small brushes. For the originals she also begins with watercolour, later adding gouache or other opaque media for more texture. Often she will choose a fundamental colour throughout the story to set a general mood. For “Ingen utom jag” it was blue, and she started by giving the whole paper a blue tone as a background before actually painting. If she isn’t satisfied, she may rinse out the paint under a running tap and repaint the sheet, but traces of the underlying first layer will always be visible. She wants her pictures to be beautiful and vibrant, but not necessarily perfect.
Ole Søndergaard
by Marianne Gross
As a graphic designer Ole Søndergaard has had a remarkable carrier in Denmark, but he has always practiced many forms of art in his spare time. Both his parents were artists and even though he had talent and wanted to work creatively, they knew all about the hardships of being a free artist, so they encouraged him to study graphic design at the Architect School in Copenhagen. Through the years he has had many exhibitions, he takes photos, he creates wooden sculptures, toys, and figures, he draws and paints with all types of media. He travels a lot around the world documenting buildings and places – and on these trips he finds it handy to bring a small watercolour kit along with the “dry” media. In 1999 he wished to experience the Arctic so he and his wife made the first of several trips to Greenland and Svalbard. His most recent exhibition “The Ice Around Greenland” fills both floors of Fuglsanghus in Hørsholm, Denmark with many drawings and paintings – including numerous watercolour works. His graphic background shines through on some of the works where the bright blue nuances are sharply placed against the white (unpainted) areas of the sheets. He is exceptionally fascinated by icebergs, calling them floating monuments of indescribable beauty”. Even after the end of the exhibition, many of the works may be enjoyed in the book that was published at this occasion.
Watercolor as a form of knowledge: between science and imagination
by Ida Rödén
During the early years of expedition when the world wasn’t yet described in images, explorers needed to measure, test and describe what they encountered. Before the invention of the camera, the watercolour medium became a way of capturing the essence long enough to understand it. Carl von Linné thought that a drawing or a watercolour was a better way of rendering an object than even the most comprehensive written descriptions. Sven Hedin painted his own watercolour images of landscapes and cities from his expeditions around the world, and the works of Margret Mee are both scientific documents and sad testimonies. She spent more than 40 years in the Amazon painting very detailed watercolours of the plants she encountered. Many of them are now extinct or endangered. The biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel used watercolour to study microscopic organisms. His works contributed to classifications and theory developments. Even Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, worked in a way that resembles the logic of watercolour. He noticed nuances, patterns, and movements in colour when allowing bacteria cultures to grow into each other on agar in much the same way watercolour behaves when water and pigment are allowed to interact freely. In modern times images no longer need to be descriptive and the artist is no longer an illustrator but a creator of understanding. It is in this field that the Swedish watercolour artist and researcher Alexandra Walsh works. She has a scientific background and a practice routed in watercolour material. She describes her work as watercolour chemistry. Watercolor is not used to simplify the world, but to make its complexity visible. Science and art do not appear as opposites, but as parallel forms of attention.
Kasia Wiercinska
by Anna Sörenson Rydh
To enter Kasia Wiercinska’s paintings is like stepping into a fairy-tale world with cityscapes in soft colours, rosy church towers, and turquoise seas. She paints with an architect’s exactness and sense of perspective. She paints plein-air (outdoors) and strives to focus on her own relation to each of the depicted places conveying her own feelings, her memories and her dreams in a free manner. She says she tries to capture the moment and makes lots of mistakes, but often the mistakes become the most interesting part of the picture. She is born and raised in Poland and has drawn and painted for as long as she can remember. At the age of 12 she invested her pocket money in good watercolour painting materials and has loved the media ever since. She attended various art courses, but was educated as an architect and at one point moved to New Zealand with her husband. Here she attended courses with the Korean artist Min Kim who taught her all the basics about watercolour. In November 2022 she moved with her husband and her infant daughter to Oslo, Norway. At first she thought it might be hard for her to adjust from the very bright and vivid surroundings of New Zealand to the darker and colder Nordic atmosphere, but she finds alle the many shades of grey very inspiring. Apart from teaching watercolour in her studio in Oslo, she has also worked with image therapy for adults with Down syndrome and autism.