Omslagsbild:
Regina Kylberg Bobeck – motiv från Capri
Regina Kylberg Bobeck
by Jacqueline Stare
Regina Kylberg Bobeck was, together with her nine brothers and four sisters, taught drawing and painting by her father in their home at the Såtenäs Manor in Skaraborg County, Sweden. Regina Kylberg Bobeck was above all a very sensitive painter of nature. She had the ability to capture the light in various types of landscapes and one can clearly discern the characteristics of the nature in her home district, the Norwegian mountains, town milieus as well as landscapes in Italy. Regina is far too little known in relation to the fact that she was a very capable acquarellist and a good drawer. About 100 of her very best works are kept in the Skaraborg County Museum. The dairy which Regina and one of her sisters kept during their stay in Italy 1880-1883 was published by the Cikada Publishing House in 1981 and contains a vast amount of drawings and watercolour paintings.
Sam Westerholm
by Jacqueline Stare
Sam Westerholm is mainly a sculptor, but also a draughtsman. Watercolour is to him often a means to further strengthen the expression of a drawing. He is in great demand as a portrait sculptor. He captures his models first in drawings which he likes to reinforce with watercolour and then in clay. He has an almost creepy talent to crawl on to the person he depicts and often manages to bring forward what no words can formulate about a human being. Technique and organic forms meet in many of his works. The forms in especially animal forms become purified, abstracted and thus enrich each other. Sam Westerholm loves to sail and during his sailing tours he always paints in watercolours. The paintings become a kind of dairy about the days at sea and the varying nature when ashore.
Per Joelson
by Lasse Sandström
Per Joelson´s watercolour works have been shown at jury-judged exhibitions all over southern Sweden, but not yet in the rest of the Nordic countries. Like many acquarellists, he paints several pictures at a time, which opens up to spontaneous ideas at the same time that he keeps the control. He uses a lot of earth colours. Autumn and spring are well suited for these colours. Per Joelson tries to take control over light and darkness, he shifts from forests to plains, to a lake in the neighbourhood and sometimes to the rocks on the Swedish west coast where he stays for a few weeks every autumn. He also works with portraits. – What I paint does not have to look like the motif. The light and the atmosphere is what counts, he says.
Margareta Persson
by Jacqueline Stare
Margareta Persson´s main means of expression is not watercolour but tempera and screen printing. Of late, however, painting in watercolour has become of greater importance to her. This is partly due to the courses in watercolour and tempera painting that she gives, and the interplay with her pupils. When Margareta Persson talks about her watercolour painting, she all the time returns to the fact that what she wants to depict is the light and the swift nuances. Most often, she starts painting quickly and unconditionally so as to see what happens on the paper. When she then has an idea of whereto the picture is going, she lets it develop at a slower pace. She often washes out the paint and uses the changed structure of the washed-out paper surface. She washes and paints over several times and her watercolour painting is in that way related to tempera and oil painting. There one often sees the traces of underlying coats of paint.
Carl Schubert
by Jacqueline Stare
Nature – not the town landscape – is Carl Schubert´s most important source of inspiration. He strolls in the woods or he moves round the edge of the wood and sometimes he looks out towards a field. He depicts a glade or planks that form a footbridge across a brook, the light behind a window that is reflected in the water in front of the building. His world is quite his own, a synthesis of reality and imagination, very seldom populated by a human figure but often by birds. The birds can be seen as symbols of freedom, they may be leaving the thick landscape and fly out into the light, out into the world, just as he lets a kite float out into space. It is easy to think in symbols in front of his pictures and one is allowed to do so. Some symbol interpretations are common to the artist and the onlooker. Others stand for each one of us in our own fantasy. Everything deals with light in Carl Schubert´s painting. That is why he has, for about thirty years, mainly painted in watercolours, for the single reason that this is the only technique that gives him a possibility of producing the light he always is seeking.
British watercolours and drawings 1640-1860
by Peter V Nielsen
This is the title of the summer exhibition of the Nordic Watercolour Museum. The Museum has managed to borrow an exhibition from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which covers considerable parts of the English – and thereby the Western world´s – development of the watercolour art from being a recording tool for explorers, among others, to an independent art genre with an organization and industry of its own. All the mentioned periods, as well as subjects like humour, drawing, sketches, figure studies, travel experiences, are represented at this year´s summer exhibition at the Nordic Watercolour Museum. www.akvarellmuseet.org
Nordic Watercolour 2007
by Jacqueline Stare
Everything for those interested in watercolour circled round “Nordic Watercolour 2007” in Ronneby with 65 participants in the jury-judged exhibition, five invited artists from the Nordic countries and the ECWS (European Confederation of Watercolour Societies) exhibition with 48 exhibitors from a number of countries all over Europe. NAS (Nordic Watercolour Society) held its annual meeting, there were excursions to the Lessebo Hand Paper Mill and to the Marine Museum in Karlskrona. There was a seminar which circled, i.a., round the history of watercolour and a debate about the role of watercolour in today´s art life, how to reach young people and what role the NAS can play in the further development of watercolour painting. The Nordic Watercolour 2007 exhibition was seen in Ronneby by about 10.000 persons. The exhibition was then shown in Luleå during five weeks. The opening took place on March 30 and the exhibition there was seen by approximately 20.000 persons. On June 9, the exhibition opened at the Edsvik Konsthall in Sollentuna just outside Stockholm, where it will be shown the entire summer.