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The Arthouse Bluebird Gallery, Whittier, California, 2006 ... about the shoes: I started depicting shoes five years ago, out of pure joy when seeing this nice photo on the cover of a music cd. I liked the photo and transferred it into the painting Shoes I. I usually use photos as an idea, which I then turn into painting of my own. It gradually became a concept. Studying art history, there were quite a few artists who used shoes as their motives, like Van Gogh, or from more recent history, Andy Warhol. And there is of course a long history of portrait painting. I merged the two into one, taking a nice object (a woman’s shoe), and putting it into the centre of the painting. By putting shoes into different situations, different worlds, I try to portrait the mood, or atmosphere, like old masters of painting did with human faces. As I see it, the portraits of the shoes give us same life stories as the normal portraits, just from a different perspective. … and about the every day objects: I am also a big admirer of the American pop art movement, and am strongly influenced by pop art figures like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and others. Depicting every day objects that do, or do not grab our attention on a daily basis, using bright colors, contrasts, and simplifications, became a meaning to express stories and situations that occur in our lives. A cup of coffee that is about to spill, a ringing telephone, etc…, all these are metaphors for the time we live in, for the fast tempo of our lives in which we usually forget to pay attention to these little insignificant moments. On the other hand, we can merely look at those paintings as nice decoration material. I like to play with duality of meanings, as well as with simplicity of those motives. They leave me, the painter and my audience with a tremendous amount of creative potential to depict and imagine our own stories. |
