Skogens Rymd

“Mantle”

“Well, I think I´m going to say an obvious thing, but nature is so rich that is impossible not to be inspired,” says Allesia Brusco, aka Skogens Rymd.  Her painterly title means “the space of the forest” in Swedish, telling of the world that she captures on the canvas.  The artist has made a name for herself by creating images inspired by natural phenomena that hold the spirit of ancient myths.  Each painting is a Nordic landscape.  The ebb, flow, and creshendo of an epic tale is found in the depth and lights of colors, the movement of celestial bodies, and the steadfast presence of a dense forest.

The classical landscape is a benign image, some may even call the genre boring.  Few artists have presented the landscape, an image that appreciates forms in nature, with a sense of awe that is on the cusp of otherworldly.  (Thomas Uttech is another artist who successfully put his own spin on the genre).  Skogens Rymd became an internet sensation because she presents nature as she sees it interacting with her wealths of knowledge in various subjects.

Bringing new life into the landscape, the paintings gained popularity over social media culminating in Brusco’s current show at Gallery Marcus in Ystad, Skåne, Sweden (https://www.instagram.com/gallerymarcus/)

While she finds inspiration in the sky in Southern Sweden, the artist is originally from Northern Italy.  She was always an avid reader, managing to “devour” a book in a manner of hours.  Reading Tolkien spurred an interest in ancient and medivel studies, in which she has holds a degree.  “I´ve read a lot of medieval literature from many countries, mostly Italy, England, France, Spain and Scandinavia. I really like novels from Nordic writers,” her favorites being among Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, Selma Lagerlöf, Arto Paasilinna, Jón Kalman Stefanssón, Fridtjof Nansen, and Mikael Niemi.  Philosophy, anthropology, and archeology are also of interest to Brusco.  All of her studies feed her artistry.  “Sometimes I add a quote, under the title of my paintings, coming from a book that gave me something I wanted to transform in an image.”

“Inner Space” 

Sweden is her creative home, in a sense.  “I´ve always been fascinated by this culture and I felt at once home here and inspired by everything I paint.  The sky is so clear here in the countryside that I started to look at the stars more often.  Obviously not only the culture I got from books, but many of the legends and the environment here helped me to start to paint on December 2015.”

It is no surprise that Brusco feels quite at home in her landscapes.  “Where I was born, in the northwest of Italy, there is a lot of nature and I lived in little town by the sea.  Here in Sweden the nature is of course more dominant and I like it very much.  I really feel good in the countryside with not so many people, cars, buildings, and noises. When I have to come back to Italy, each time I just get to the train station or the airport, it´s like a little trauma to come back in a big city and I feel quite misplaced.”  The details of her paintings come from what I imagine to be a peaceful study of her surroundings.  “What really inspire me are the colors of the sky at dusk or dawn.  There are so many tones that most of the  times is so difficult to reproduce because the human eye is lured to think that, for example, a kind of pink is warmer but when you try it on the canvas it has another effect.”

 

About the Artwork:

I painted “Lullaby” without thinking at the title in the first place. I just wanted to experiment an Aurora Borealis with pink/violet colours and make it appear like a veil. When I finished it, in a way I perceived it like dreamish, like a veil in the sky and I thought it could be so nice to fall asleep under such a sky.

“Isfrun väg” takes the name from the Lady of the Cold in a novel by Tove Jansson from the Moomin serie. The book is called “Trollvinter” in swedish (translated as “Moominland Midvinter”) and describes the adventure lived by Moomintroll who wakes up from hibernation and experiences the winter for once with some of his friends. During the winter, strange and dangerous creatures come out from their hiding places and the Lady of the Cold is one of them.  She rides around freezing and killing everything with her icy stare. I´ve read again the book before Christmas and I had the idea to try to paint her my way with her dress like Northern Lights.

http://skogens-rymd.webnode.com 

Instagram 

 

 

 

Matti Sirvio

“Encounter”

In Matti Sirvio’s paintings there is time and space, the movement of the soul.  His paintings simultaneously celebrate the felt senses, the beauty in life, and the nature of a spiritual existence. “I think that colors and their composition are the key to all visual communication.  I love connecting them, experimenting the way that they relate to each other.  I sometimes do just long color meditations (sounds much more weird than it is.)”  With his eyes closed, Sirvio spends time envisioning colors and diverse patterns.  “It helps me to move objects and see how certain colors serve certain messages.”

On Sirvio’s Instagram account, it is sometimes hard to tell what is a painting and what is a photo.  The play of shadow and light on a building, cast-off objects in the sand, appear at first to be Sirvio’s painted works.  Upon closer inspection, you see that they are all pieces of the quiet town of Muscat, Oman.  In compositions that most people can witness every day without reverence, the artist sees more.

For over thirty-five years, Sirvio has been a humanitarian worker through Greater Grace World Outreach (GGWO) in Eurasia and Central Asia.  While he treasures the many places that he has lived in, Oman is now home.  “I fell in love with the Omani people.  They are very gentle, silent and friendly. For some foreigners, this country is eventless and even boring.  For me it’s a privilege.”  Fourteen years ago, he attended a conference on Mumbai, India.  Through contacts there, the opportunity to work in Oman presented itself.  It would take some years for Sirvio’s schedule to allow for him to work in Oman with GGWO.  When he was able to visit for a conference, he also found a place for his artwork.  “I was invited by the Protestant Church of Oman to do a weekend conference in Muscat.  I often travel with my art and also work in hotel rooms during my travels.  I took some of my paintings to a local gallery and connected with them.  That resulted in a solo exhibition here.”

“My artistic journey has its intensive creative times and long times of silence as well.”  Sirvio was born and raised in Finland where he studied art.  He originally wanted to purse becoming an art therapist.  But, as a young man he felt called to humanitarian work and as an artist, he felt disconnected from the art world.  “As a young person, I found the art world to be extremely selfish and self-oriented.  Besides that, I had a really hard time connecting with all the perverted art that started spreading in the seventies.  I didn’t want to be a part of it.”  Deep into his journey as a humanitarian worker art would re-emerge for him in a way that was healing.  “Twenty-seven years later I was full of art again. I just had to start painting.  I didn’t have a choice.  It didn’t just make me happy, but it helped me to manage my soul.  Art is not the most important thing in my life, the presence of God is.  Art is a helper.”

The painting “Encounter” communicates a spiritual way of experiencing what comes and goes.  The spiritual is a constant, a thread woven through every part of life.  The soul need not suffer when something meaningful ends, but have joy for the impression that was left and for the meaningful encounters that will also come and go in the future.

Two figures are in the shape of doorways, each one emitting some of kind of movement.  The one on the left appears to contain light, while the shape on the right is red.  The light feels like a spiritual force, while the red is earthy, human.  The two are open to each other to mingle, to merge, but the temporal of nature of the “Encounter” implies that they will each return to their spaces and close their doors.

These colors and symbols illustrate the nature of an encounter from a spiritual perspective.  A person can form a lasting attachment to an experience after it has passed, returning to themselves, yet remaining somehow changed.  Also, the joy of the peak of the moment does not have to turn into despair because it ends.  If there is more to life than moments, then there is no need to mourn what is lost but celebrate what remains and what will be part of the never-ending life of the soul.

In Sirvio’s paintings, there are dreams, prayers, scents, and sensations.  The artist is a deeply spiritual person who clearly has a reverence for life.  “I love all the places where I have lived. God gives you a special love for it. Without that I could not see myself connecting with other cultures and people.”  He is writing a book about the GGWO ministry Central Asia and paints in his spare time.  “I continue dragging my paintings all over the world, exhibiting them wherever I can and praying that I could reach one more person with the love of Jesus.”

mattisirvio.com 

 

Lael Burns

“Secret Place”

Lael Burns’ artwork is delicate dance.  The murky, fleshy shapes and celestial glitter bodies tell a story of opposites that interact.  It is a painful struggle.  Within the intricacy of this exchange, of these gruesome and pleasing elements, there is beauty.

“Making art has always been a way for me to process life and is just something that ‘clicked’ with me from early on,” says Burns, who lives and works in the Fort Worth, Texas area.  The shapes in Burns’ artwork developed in her childhood.  “I used to have this huge magnolia tree in my yard growing up, and the buds that fall off the tree fascinated me.  In middle school, I started drawing them and thinking about other biological and organic forms as a representation of my inner self, so it’s a means of communication and expression I adopted that I still use.”  Burns placed a high value on her creativity from a young age, due to support from her family and teachers.  Art became a necessity in her young life.  “When I was in middle school I feel like I really turned to art as means of survival during some dark family circumstances and just never stopped making.”

“The Blessing”

Viewing much of what Burns creates is an experience of repugnance and awe.  Confronted with an element that is ugly and strange, it is hard to look away from its relation to what is beautiful.  Organic forms in her current work are like wombs and gnarled roots, an outpouring of her psyche and spirit that comes from a deeply spiritual place.  The lure of darkness and the pursuit of connection to God are ever-present themes.  This duality of existence is shown as the visual layers of human nature and the spirit.  On the canvas, the distorted being (human nature) still possesses the spark of true life (spirit) that will remain after death and presently reaches for connection with the heavenly realm.

“The Process of Believing Beauty”

What has had a powerful effect on her canvases is the renewal of Burns’ soul at the age of twenty-seven when she pursued Christian faith.  Like the tension between what is ugly and beautiful, the past and the present are relevant aspects of what the artist communicates with forms.  “I think much of my work prior to this major change was dealing with similar ideas and themes.  I was just on the other side of it. I was heavily steeped in church and Christianity growing up, but I was angry and running from Christ, whereas now my work is a picture of a person finally yielded to and remade by Christ.”  There is a heavy sense of matter in the bulbous forms that rise from the page.  Bright airy clouds and shrouds of smoke balance the weight.  The colors, and glitter accents, harken to the light in the soul.  “The most exciting, driving aspect of my work to me now is continuing to experience healing and deliverance from God and watching how that plays out visually. It’s a process that will continue until I die.”

Burns’ life is also a balance, one that she approaches with a spiritual flow.  She is a wife, mother of two small children, and manages to dive deeply into the creative process while they nap or play outside.  While motherhood often pulls artists away from their practice, Burns found balance in an at-home residency and support network for mothers.  “I did a 6 month long residency with An Artist Residency in Motherhood which really helped reframe the way I was thinking about my work after I had our second child and I stopped working.”  Burns was formerly a high school art teacher.  “It was a big adjustment to go from working full time and being away from my children so much, to being home all the time with then a newborn and a toddler. It was a big adjustment emotionally and for my studio practice, but such a good one.”  Some sessions meant creating with the kids, while others were fruitful moments like the ones that she finds in her day now.  ARIM helped her set the tone for being a creative person and a mother.  “[It] helped me get in contact with other artist mothers and reinvent a studio practice that works with my situation once my daughter got a little older.”

“Revival’s Seed 8”

Burns now homeschools both children while maintaining her studio practice.  She does not keep a rigid creative schedule, but lets her studio time fall into a unique pattern each day. She often works on several pieces, assembly-line style, somehow knowing what each different piece needs at the same time.  It is unconventional, but helps her maintain a certain level of productivity.  The process is successful, considering that new pieces are frequently popping up on her Instagram account.

Burns’ current sculptural exhibit at Fort Worth’s Art 7 Gallery is wrapping up soon.  The artist will continue to find inspiration in the spiritual aspects of her life and seek balance one day at a time.  “You’re only going to be able to get so much done if you are with your children, and I’ve just made peace with that.  I’m learning and enjoying this season of less structure and just ‘going with the flow’ and staying in the place of joy and freedom.  I know it’s so cliché, but my children will only be little this one time and I want to enjoy it.”

Learn more about Lael here:

Laelburns.com