A completely different matter

Swedish

A couple of photos

Here are some photos from a couple of my bicycle vacations in 2005, 2006 and from the summer 2007. The weather the dreadful summer 2007 gave me but one really good opportunity for a vacation by bicycle but that one turned out to be a top one. Besides being an ordinary tourist I made some root-seeking and met with lots of interesting people, Swedes as well as foreign tourists. It’s to wonder how rudimentary knowledge in other languages than English can open doors and give an extra bonus.

Furthermore, when I have at last after all these years constructed a website after months of toil I thought I could just as well show some of my oil-paintings and pencil drawings. As far as painting is concerned I never got further than merely painting from nature, from objects etc, but when it comes to my drawings I think I've found a niche of my own, i.e. something that might be called my very own and personal way of expression. I must say I've never myself come across anything quite like it. I cannot deny, though, that I have to some minute extent been inspired by the two English artists Brian Froud and Alan Lee. These, however, are mostly painters as far as I know.
I call my productions 'sculptural graphics'. It's quite obvious that they do indeed depict something, an object of some kind, but what kind of object? ... Well, that is the question.

My technique of drawing

The motives are most often totally or partly non-figurative and I rarely know beforehand how a drawing will turn out once finished. It's exactly the same as when I'm writing on a novel or even a short story. It is as if at a certain point during the work the drawing or the novel to some extent is taking over the creation process. This is totally unintended and more than a little spooky!

All the drawings exept three, are made on a paper in A3 paper size made especially for artistic drawings with a 'grain' witch itself gives the drawing a certain feeling of being made of a material of some kind. Only the conch, the stern Ojibwa-boy and the two other Indian children (Lilloeet) are in size A4. I start a drawing with a couple of thin lines with a very hard pencil that gives just a barely visible result. These I give forms I myself call 'natural' and 'harmonious'. Once the outlines are drawn I start to add shadows with pencils of increasing softness giving the shadows a deeper and deeper blackness. At this point most of the structures begin to appear as well as holes, ridges, the surface etc, sometimes to my own surprise.
I use seven pencils with gradients from very hard to almost pure charcoal. When finished I spray the drawing with cellulose to keep it from getting smudged when handled.

This is the closest I've come to free form art, apart from the fact that I of course have to submit to the nature of light and shadows that can render a three-dimensional look to a given form and give the impression that the object might be made of wood, horn, metal or that it even has organic origin.
One peculiar fact concerning my drawings is that they can be turned ninety degrees, thus giving an almost totally new impression. Turn them further ninety degrees and they'll give yet another impression and turn them a third and last time for yet another.
All my drawings of course have a title given by me, but every onlooker is entitled to interpret them after his or her own mind, therefore I haven't added my names for them but for the first three.

In addition to my artistic drawings I've also picked some illustrations from my early production. I do indeed admit the image quality per se is not perfect. I had to dismount the drawings since they are all protected by glass, which would otherwise have given unacceptable reflexes. Unfortunately they are too big for my A4-scanner, so I had to take photographs of them.
Quite naturally I want to prevent people from using them for their own purposes (for every single one there are 30-40 hours of concentrated work) I only show them greatly reduced in size. To show my technique, though, I do show a larger detail from one of them.

Most of the paintings are represented in the same size here, no matter the original size.

My roots(?)

In the future I'll also present some of my genealogical research here. I've been seeking my roots for thirty years now. There are quite a few names of ancestors and other relatives that I've been able to collect, a bit over 20.000 to be more exact.

Tours in Sweden on my bicycle

My art

Updated
Oct 4 2009