Anna Israelsson
By Karin Faxén Sporrong
In Anna Israelsson’s imagery one may find remnants from the quiet and remote parts of Lappland where she grew up. She and her family used to walk a lot in the forests. Aged 20 she left her hometown to study industrial design and art. Life passed, she pursued a career and started a family. These years she didn’t paint, but yearned to do soand during the pandemic she took up painting again. She love the characteristics of watercolour and is attracted to the free-flowing, vibrant and uncontrollable media and does not care whether she follows established rules on how watercolour painting should be done. She has recently begun to include people in her paintings. She is drawn to depicting characters in a manner that is much more personal, even though it seems more challenging for her to paint her own son for instance. But she finds the courage to step into this unknown territory the same way she finds courage to walk deep into the woods she wants to paint, even though she is somewhat afraid of them.

Gunilla Sundin Blomgren
By Jacqueline Stare
Visual storytelling regardless of media (painting, drawing, sculptures, photos, diaries) has always been the basis of Gunilla Sundin Blomgren’s artistic expresssion. She is fascinated by the human body be it resting or engaging in some kind of play or other activity. She has a large family that she paints while they are practising yoga or swimming or doing other things. Her figures are depicted on the edge of balance and control, quite a complicated task. She has studied, painted and drawn the human body for many years which is obvious. In her paintings she aims to depict volume, motion, and light as key ingredients. Her colour palette is limited but bold and she makes use of the characteristics of the different pigments and how they affect each other. During the summertime when Gunilla Sundin Blomgren has time for watercolour, she always starts practicing on small diary-sized landscapes. Houses and buildings as subject matters are just as important for her as human bodies.

Christina Kynde
by Marianne Gross
Even though she loved painting as a child, Christina Kynde never dreamt of pursuing an artistic career. Painting is a hobby that she immerses into with great passion, but she wants to do it only when she has the time and feeling for it without any pressure. Years ago she was introduced to watercolour painting by an unorthodox teacher who was very experimental and inspiring. Christina Kynde learned to be fearless in her approach of the media and she will not set limitations as to which kind of materials she will use or how to use them. Her large paintings (56x76cm and larger) are completed in one go almost as an explosion. Once they are done, she always leaves them as they are to maintain the freshness and vitality. Lately she has concentrated on depicting people, mostly in bizarre or unusual situations. She is interested in the stories these images tell – stories of which she might not even know the contents. In 2010 Christina Kynde was awarded with the Nordic Watercolour Society’s Winsor & Newton Prize.

Presentation of Members of ECWS – the European Confederation of Watercolour Societies | AIB – Aquarelinstituut van België
From time to time when there is space, we have decided to bring a brief presentation in the magazine of other member societies of ECWS. The European Confederation of Watercol­our Societies was founded in 1998 to internationally promote the art of watercolour painting and to encourage cooperation among national and regional watercolour societies. The birth of AIB can be traced back to 1976 when two ama­teur painters exhibited their watercolours in the rural village of Mol in the North of Belgium. The initiative appealed to other passionate lovers of the medium and in 1983 an association was established: “Watercolour In­stitute of Belgium”. The goals of the AIB are to stimulate the art of watercolour by organizing workshops, visits to exhibitions and museums in Belgium and abroad, to make watercolour known to a broader public and last but not least to strive to have watercolour rec­ognized as a full-fledged form of art.