Painting is the invisible imprint

I do not work within independently limited projects, and I see painting as part of an ongoing process.

It started once, and will continue until it ends. Every painting is a chapter of a story, told in a continuous stream. Some of the paintings are difficult to finish, it’s like they have a need for more time. Every single painting has it’s own journey, with emotion and precision.

Paint is added in layers, building a foundation, sometimes visible, other times the traces of the process is the message of the painting. The time consumed in the making, the footprint, is seen through thickness and structure, the traces in the material. The painting is born by the actual meeting with the material, and the resistance and the moulding possibilities are sometimes exploited and used up to the material’s bearable limits. In other works the paint is added in thin layers, and where some elements are disguised and erased, other elements are developed.

In this way the paintings hold several layers of expression.

My work belong to the abstract painting, with a multitude of possible variations, lyrical, geometrical, spontaneous, biomorf, thick layers or minimalistic. It takes courage to choose the abstraction as expression.

My aim is not a new, artistic direction, but to create a personal work composited from variations that never stops, while always being satisfactory for each creation.
I work my way into the painting, and strive to give an imprint to the invisible. The depth of the painting, the material’s thickness, the wealth, pulls the viewer into the paintings. The tactile part of the painting is a condition, and some paintings appear as part of the web of life.

My relationship to the physical is questioned, the transferral of colour to the canvas and all that arises... new questions always related to the primitive process of painting.


Tove Sigrun Hellerud
2009-03-26