Jeg ser på maleriet som en prosess som likner den menneskelige væren. Tanker, minner ligger lagvis oppå hverandre. Noe forblir skjult i bevisstheten, utilgjengelig som et lukket mørke, andre ting trenger frem. Maleriet er også å gjenskape et sted. Å erfare stedet ved å være der over tid, for så å male det etterpå. For eksempel i maleriet “The Ukrainian Funeral” finnes det nivåer av grep, bevissthet. Vi kan gripe noe på et plan, men ikke på et annet. Det betyr at måten vi griper noe på er slik at vi griper det, selv om vi ikke griper det helt. Vi ser i gjennom blomsten, over i et landskap som den døde ligger foran. Billedrommet, landskapet bak figuren blir således en del av skikkelsens kropp. Landskapet er skikkelsens erfaring. Slik øyeblikket før døden tar opp i seg alle tider, erfaringer og steder som personen har opplevd.
“Virkeligheten er vag. Derfor er det nærmere en ekte verden å vise konturene av en verden, enn å vise en verden som er klarere enn den er. Det finnes mye klarhet som ikke er ekte, dvs uttrykk, som er klarere enn hva virkeligheten gir utrykk for. Kunst er mange ting. Og heldigvis er det ingen som vet hva kunst er. Men som best tvinger den oss til å forstå det som er fremmed for oss, ved å la oss ta del i det.”
Gard Frigstad fra artikkelen Skriften på speilet.
It is surely true that we could feel before we could think – one only has to observe our animal companions to see that feeling predates thinking. Yet when we try to talk about feelings, our language is surprisingly sparse. The Eskimos have 50 words for snow, but we have only one word for melancholy, for example. This is not because there are only one way of being melancholy, each experience has its own shade: to be melancholy about a long dead friend has a different quality than to be melancholy from a painting of Svein Johansen, say. I claim that this is not the same feeling for two different reasons, but it is two different feelings for which we have no separate words. (For a more complete view, consider “the felt sense” from the work of philosopher Gene Gendlin).
For me, to write about painting is to look backwards. May aim is to capture a complexity of feeling that language cannot express. I do not go from feelings to concepts to symbols and finally to the canvas. I start with a feeling state, maybe associated with a visual experience, and develop it directly into a painting. I don’t know in advance what will come out of me, any more than I know what I will dream before I go to sleep at night. But I dream anyway, and paint anyway.
There are various ‘scientific’ theories about the purpose of dreams, none of which do justice to their richness and complexity. I am convinced, like Carl Jung, that they are deeply meaningful, and we can only strive to understand them imperfectly. They are no less meaningful than the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which where only deciphered in modern times after the chance discovery of the Rosetta stone. We must not say that what we don’t understand makes no sense.
In my paintings I am reaching for the similar fountain of creativity as dreams. I do not try to psychoanalyse them, but I judge their success by how I feel when I look at them. This is not a matter of “happy” or “sad”. Feeling is not a small area contained in the universe of language, but the reverse – it is the ocean in which language is a bobbing raft. We are carried here and there by its currents, without the words to describe what is happening to us.
The aim of the artist is to broaden her own feeling for the world through expressing imagery, and in this way help her viewers do the same. If the viewers look at the paintings and feeling nothing, then the paintings have failed. If they look at them and feel something, but are not quite sure how to describe it, then they have succeeded.
There is a theory that humans learned to sing before they could talk, that talking developed out of singing1. I would like to think of my paintings as songs rather than lectures.
We could see before we could speak. We could paint before we could write.
1. cf. Steven Mithen’s book “The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body”