The Thorstein Perspective

Everyone experiences the surroundings from their own perspective . Furthermore, the visual artist interprets, emphasizes and maintains his point of view:
"I have reached this point - and emphasize what I notice".

Grew up with visual arts, dragged around museums, had art books thrust into my hands and was taught about what is pretty and what is not pretty.
Both my parents are professional visual artists and their critical pressure has followed me ever since.

The purpose of all creation is to change reality. Something that is different strives to be inserted into a larger context.
The painter explores the limits of his abilities with a view to transcendence.
The individual painting appears in a series where specific issues are investigated in color and form.

The creation process becomes a metaphysical tension between spiritual approaches and practical requirements.
This prepared and ideal state can only be maintained for a limited period of time, when thoughts and surroundings fall away in favor of automatic
The Thorstein Perspective

brush stroke. Intuition has taken over – and afterwards the painter steps back and assesses the result in a mixture of wonder and happiness, as if he has been allowed to participate in some universal context.

It is this meditative, soulful state that afterwards attracts the experience for the viewer and the most successful works are, regardless of the subject, pure portraits of the soul.

When the artist searches into his own soul, into the archetypes and the shared human layers, the artistic expressions become mirror images of what stirs in the contemporary subconscious, and art thereby becomes a contributing actor in the development of society.

My paintings are suggestions of what is going on in the environment/time and are about contradictions and challenges, aesthetic as well as ethical, that would like to end up as summarized impressions.
When the work closes in on itself, to the degree of skill it now requires, the creation process is only finally achieved when the work is exhibited in front of a public - and produces an experiential effect where the recipient feels a release of his own inner self.
The Thorstein Perspective

The understanding depends on how pure-hearted and accommodating the viewer approaches the work.

Seen retrospectively, it becomes clear that my painting spreads over several different genres.
Sometimes other forms of art: Sculpture, photography, writing... have taken over.
This variation, combined with impressions from other people's works, travels, literature, dreams – and comments from the environment around me, this whole wealth of sensory impressions presses in and demands its own unique idiom every time.
May the exhibition live up to your expectations.

Thorstein/April 2012