Sanger Fra Mor
Sanger Fra Mor (Songs From Mother) is a narrative, figurative project that reinvents memory. Evoking themes of maritime history, the culture of work, and time using selected images, symbols and repetition this project seeks to transform historic images and oral history into a visual essay. I draw upon my experiences both as a young boy aboard ship with my father, and as a member of the crew on a commercial tuna purse seine vessel. Further inspiration for my work is gained from summer trips to Monhegan Island, Maine where I paint in the open air and research the resources of the Monhegan Museum. In my work, the persistence of memory and the stages of life as well as the environmental crisis of our oceans are thematic subtexts.
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Songs for My Father
In 2002, I completed 1,000 works in my project, Songs for My Father, a body of landscape-inspired pieces in various media, dedicated to my late father, a Norwegian commercial tuna fisherman. For this work, I painted the landscape, a long-standing Nordic subject, in and around Acadia National Park, Maine, during the 1980’s, and have worked on Monhegan Island during the summers since 1995. In winter 1999, while an artist-in-residence at Weir Farm, a national historic site administered by the National Park Service, in Wilton, CT, I began to explore the woodlands as a complement to the seacoast. In 2001, I was a visiting artist at Weir Farm.
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Memento Mori
In an essay for Chaos and Awe, an exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Mark C. Scala writes that the exhibition “demonstrates the aptness and relevance of painting as a medium for expressing the uncertainty of our era.”
In 2016, I learned I had cancer. During treatment, I realized not only is cancer an uncertain, looming epidemic, and threat to millions (15 million people have cancer in America), but also that the remarkable medical advancements of our time could provide relevant, important subject matter for contemporary painting.
I have painted Maine since the 1980s and now live in Westbrook. I work in two distinct styles. I’ve made a body of landscape-inspired paintings, works on paper and plein air watercolors, as well as a body of abstract paintings and works on paper reusing a cast of characters in dislocated remembered surroundings hinting at themes of life, love, and death.
The Memento Mori compositions place a cast of characters amidst medical technology imagery from IMRT and CT scans, using a palette of chemo colors with techniques from monoprinting—layering, transparency, and pochoir.
Ocean Blues
I have been “painting Maine,” plein air, Down East, Mid-Coast, and on Monhegan Island for over 30 years. My experiences aboard ship with my Norwegian-born fisherman father and as a crewmember on a commercial tuna boat inform much of my sea-related imagery. The confluence of this experience and the clear and present danger of our global climate emergency influenced the Ocean Blues.
The Ocean Blues combines plein air watercolor painting with other methods and materials. The Fan Mount shape is a homage to Gauguin and Degas while the encircling elements acknowledge Delacroix’s remarques, studies bordering his lithographs. The series also alludes to perception since the field of human vision is delimited and perspectival.