Det Mörka Ljuset

As a teenager I dreamed of fame. Now I stand there at my museum, Sandgrund, successful and well known, most of my life behind me, on the verge of panic.

I feel the cold sweat break out on my forehead, my cheeks flush. Wherever I turn I meet cheerful, expectant watercolour enthusiasts. They wonder about technique and method, which colours, which paper, how to bring out a certain amount of light. How long does it take to paint a watercolour? Someone thinks the pictures are too dark. Why don't I paint in slightly happier colours? About watercolour technique I really don't have much to say. Not because I have secrets to keep, no recipe for how it is done. But the training to become an artist is at least as long as a doctor's. Thousands upon thousands of working hours. A whole life.

For several years I was not awake enough to take in new impressions, and painted the same picture over and over again. I preferred to paint what I imagined rather than what I saw. On my morning walks I used to amuse myself by playing at being an alien, pretending to see the world with new eyes, letting myself be surprised by the green difference between a spruce and a pine in the light of that particular day.

It is a way of training the eye, to escape routine. Most things have been described before, but no one sees exactly what I see. As long as I stay sober and keep my eyes open I need not worry about repetition. The grey everyday need not be so grey, if you have the chance to choose the day's palette yourself. Suddenly a new reality can reveal itself to you. That is what is so wonderful about being alive, that there is always so much left to discover.

The reproduction of the field vole, for instance, is entirely unknown.

As a landscape painter you depend on the weather, even when you sit indoors. In Lofoten I used to sit in the window and watch one low-pressure front after another roll in over the Vestfjord. The ever-changing weather suited my watercolour temperament. One moment sun and clear sky, the next a black snow squall. I had to hurry with the brush before it was all erased.

The large recurs in the small. Unity in multiplicity, multiplicity in unity. It may just as well be the moss on an erratic boulder as a blinking Spanish night sky or log drivers on the Ångerman river, the blackness of a forest tarn, a cow with a wreath of flowers around its horns, Mrs Bojan smoking at home in the living room, little Irma with her doll's pram or the boy Sven with his toy car, glints of sun, thunderclouds, whirling snow, factory smoke.

With time the obsession with painting has faded; I no longer work actively with the brush for more than a couple of hours a day at most. Yet I live most of my waking hours in art. I go out walking, I drive, I watch TV with my gaze sharpened. And everywhere the "motifs" appear. Nothing is worth more or less in my eyes. And when all is said and done, it is still the light that is the real motif. Light as the human voice. The flickering flame threatened by the great darkness.