Omslagsbild:
Stina Eidem – Student, 70x138cm

 

 

 

Stina Eidem
By Jacqueline Stare
Animals or people as motifs are of absolute equal value to Stina Eidem. The same satisfaction that she feels among animals she can feel when she is abroad and sits and draws among people in various situations without having to ponder upon how these people react on her. Typical of many of her watercolours is that the lines are drawn with brushes of various thickness, in order to produce a strong expression with the easiest possible means. Stina Eidem has visited China for a couple of months and it feels as if she made use of every second of that time. She moved – like always when she travels – among people and sketched frenetically in order to thereafter translate the drawings into fluid, intrusive and characteristic watercolours. All of us, who know Stina Eidem as an illustrator in various connections, know only a small part of her. She is one of the most curious and creative artists I have met. Her training in Stockholm has given her a broad base of technical knowhow and for her there are no works of rules, no musts. One should be able to combine, test and see what happens! The tight works of rules of the classical watercolour are absolutely nothing for her.

Peter Czerniak
By Jacqueline Stare
In the exhibition Nordic Watercolour 2007 you meet a typical example of Peter Czerniak´s deserted town pictures. There are extremely seldom any people in them. Gleams of light from traffic lights, cars or windows bear witness to life, as do street signs. Building sites are for him always interesting motifs and in Stockholm he always has an abundance of them. Volume and darkness are mirrored against transcendency, air and light. Peter Czerniak always sketches his motif, softely but with a pencil or with colour and then he puts layer upon layer of colour. He is a rather unusual acquarellist as he works on a dry paper with very little water. His technique is to put layer upon layer when the colour has dried and that is delicate as one layer too many risks easing off the light in the picture. Watching his town pictures you can esily say that this is exactly how it looks. But his wish is not to give an exact description of a building. To him it is instead a question of capturing a feeling and an atmosphere. He invites us viewers into his own Stockholm, to what is his nature and landscape depictions! We can enter these peeled off, sometimes dreamlike, quiet town landscapes and find a slightly different and very suggestive town where time stands still.

Joel Pettersson (1892-1937)
By Kjell Ekström
Joel Pettersson can without doubt be proclaimed the most remarkable cultural personality in Åland of the 20th century. He was something like an Ålandian van Gogh, an expressive artist whom the people at the time did not understand. He was also an author, puppet maker, theatre producer and cultural worker on many levels. Joel Pettersson is now an admired and respected artist and author in Åland. His literature has also started to be translated into Finnish.

How to become an owner of an (almost) Zorn watercolour
By Peter Vilhelm Nielsen
Eight-thousand artists live in the art village of Dafen close to the border to Hong Kong. They work mainly with copying traditional European art, but there are also galleries that exhibit modern Chinese art. Many of the galleries declare that they are used to copying the European watercolour technique. To test this, I ordered a copy of a watercolour painted by Zorn. It is delicate to make an unambiguous conclusion if the task was solved in a successful way. There is no doubt that the painted watercolour has a spontaneity that answers to Zorn´s watercolour. But it is different anyway. The ship and its chimney have got a modern expression, which shows that the artist has not been able to free himself of his general view and make a pure copy. He has not either been able to create water with the same conviction that Zorn always was able to.

Lolo Tillberg
By Jacqueline Stare
It was Lars Eje Larsson, whose painting courses Lolo Tillberg attended, who made her discover the watercolour painting. No other teacher has meant as much to her. Since 14 years back, she actually paints nothing else but watercolour. It is quite simply a love affair between her and the watercolour, which just deepens all the time. From the early, very realistic pictures, filled with symbolism, Lolo Tillberg has sought greater freedom, fewer motif features and a freer and more fluid painting. Imagination and reality always meet in her picture world. Her thoughts and feelings form a starting point, as do objects around her. Experiences inspire her as well. Around 2000-2001, Lolo Tillberg felt so secure in her painting that she herself started to teach watercolour painting. The individual teaching is important to her, to try to bring forward the very best of each pupil even if it takes a lot of time.

The identity of watercolour technique
By Bertil Böös
Many experiment today with the possibilities of the watercolour technique. But then you must first ask yourself what you set out from. What is actually watercolour? What criteria must be filled for a picture to be called a watercolour? There was one definition since long ago within the museum world. There the watercolour was classified as paper art and was thereby graded among various graphic techniques, sketching, graphics, gouache, etc. To be able to work in quite different ways is perhaps a part of the identity of the watercolour technique. There is a big elbowroom for the creating of something new with a maintained good watercolour technique. Good watercolour paints have a register from the most atmospherical light to the darkest.

Review with Hasse Karlsson at the Gerlesborg School
By Kiki Eldh
We gather in the large workroom of the Gerlesborg School. I have been asked to take some pictures of Hasse Karlsson at his going through of the results of the course participants. Hasse Karlsson has a way of quite physically communicating with the pictures, as to challenge and outwit them. His eyes are laborative and swift as a lightning in their selection. He clarifies and analyses. Afterwards the impressions fuse into the feeling that there is actually no difference in what he does, what he says and what he sees in the pictures. He works with repetition and variation, seeks similarity and contrast, he rythmizes and surprises, navigates in order and chaos. All this that recurs in any creating of art, in an eternal spontaneous dramaturgy.

Floating painting – watercolour in the indoor swimming
By Sassa Buregren
About an experiment where school children are let to make watercolour paintings in the water in an indoor swimming-pool. Are we going to do it again? We will see. It is worth being repeated. For adults, as meditation or pleasurable creating. Perhaps for functionally disabled children. For everybody. Perhaps not for the sake of the result, but for the experience. Because, where else should one make watercolour paintings if not in water?