Johan Thurfjell
by Anna Sörenson Rydh
Johan Thurfjell has been active in the contemporary art scene since the early 2000s. He teaches in Stockholm at the Idun Lovén Art School where he once attended the sculpture program. His master degree is from Konstfack. He is mostly known as a conceptual artist, but his relation with watercolour had begun early on. He dreamt of working with animation drawing at Disney and took a watercolour course when he was 22. He is now exhibiting at the Nordic Watercolour Museum together with Peter Köhler and Vanessa Baird. One of his projects is Dead Calm, a series of watercolour paintings depicting ships that have sunk or were lost at sea. He does a lot of testing prior to exhibitions and states that watercolour is simple but incredibly difficult at the same time. Johan Thurfjell has learnt a lot of watercolour techniques from his studio colleague Fredrik Söderberg. Following a post-master course led by Åsa Anderson-Broms at the Royal Art High School in Stockholm his artistry took a new turn with all the “blue stuff” as he calls it. The 2-year course introduced him to alternative types of materials and media such as virtual reality, optical illusions, and theatre techniques. The blue draperies are inspired by Japanese folklore. ”Omagatoki” is the blue hour between dusk and midnight and can also be interpreted as the time when the border between life and death is at its thinnest, and the good gods and the evil spirits are able to make transitions to our world.

Markus Jäntti
by Sofia Simelius
Like many other artists Markus Jäntti points out that even though watercolour usually is the first medium children are introduced to, it is exceptionally hard to master. At his recent exhibition Interplay at the Loisti Gallery in Helsingfors he showed a series of works that operated on the cross-section between painting and sculpture. On framed MDF-boards he depicted scenes from the legendary Longchamp Race Course in Paris using watercolour, pencil and small collage-like glass pieces. The contrast between the cheap underlying material and the expensive glass details combined with the child-friendly but difficult technique breaks expectations and creates surprises, which is one of the strongest things you can do in art. At the age of 13 he began to work with the graphic artist Outi Heiskanen, and later when he attended the art university in Berlin, he found interest in working with graphics combining oils, spray-painting, ceramics, and glass in an unconventional manner. He has a keen interest in horses and their long-standing relations to human beings. Ambivalence is a key word for his approach: the tradition and cultural value of horse-racing which also is brutal and unethical, the race course gathers crowds from all layers of society, and in these times of polarized debates about art and culture he wants to show that various forms of culture are dependent on each other. He continues to experiment with techniques and materials to capture the ambivalence of humanity.

Watercolours in stamps
by Marianne Gross
As of 1/1-2026 Post Nord will no longer deliver letters in Denmark. Due to the digital revolution fewer and fewer letters have been sent and the need for stamps has almost died out. The stamps have often been considered collectible small works of art, and some of them were created based on original watercolour works. Here we have focused on three series of stamps that were produced from watercolour illustrations.
Spring flowers by Annette de Jonquières, 2006:
She accompanied her shipping manager husband when he was appointed to posts in Brazil, The Philippines, and Thailand. In Brazil she began painting the native flowers in watercolour (always from live models) and has since excelled as a botanic illustrator.
Play in the snow by Jens Hage, 2009
Jens Hage is a well-known Danish illustrator (see our article in akvarellen 2/2020). This series was the first stamps on self-adhesive paper in Denmark. The Danish Mail asked him for winter subjects and he was reminded of how he used to play in the snow with his siblings.
The Queen’s watercolours from original watercolour paintings by Queen Margrethe, 2018
It is a well-known fact that Queen Margrethe has a life-long passion for collecting and creating art. She is also the sovereign of Greenland and this series of Greenlandic stamps is based on some of her paintings of Greenlandic landscapes. One of the stamps was printed with an additional charity value for the cause of Greenlandic children.

Aina Stenberg-MasOlle
by Anna Sörenson Rydh
You might know Aina Stenberg-MasOlles beautiful Christmas calendar motives with small elves, baby Jesus, angels, etc. Even though she published the first advent calendar in 1934 and many picture books along with thousands of Christmas and Easter cards, there is surprisingly little written about her. She came from a family of 12 children who all were encouraged to study art. Already from the age of 10 she started painting originals for printed Easter and Christmas cards for a publishing company (5000-6000 motives). Later on, she studied at the Royal Art Academy where she also met her future husband, the portrait painter Helmer MasOlle. She created 29 original calendars which were commissioned by the girl scouts’ organization. She was influenced by Japanese art as well as art nouveau, and her motives and compositions became style-forming. Her illustrated fairy-tales cannot be found at any publisher today, but it is still possible to buy some of them from the 70s or 80s in second-hand book stores. She illustrated the classic fairy-tales such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood as well as song books and ABCs. She died a few days before turning 90.