Old Landscapes Inspire New Visions – The Work of Nikolai Astrup and Nexus Interactive Arts
‘The landscape of Jølster; that smell and mouldy dampness of old heathendom and primitive religion, that earth rich in sagas; these often raw colours have more importance than as mere subjects for my pictures. And this in my opinion is what motifs should be to all painters, that they in other words should be closer bound to the earth…’
– Nikolai Astrup
Astrup sought a national “visual language” that evoked the traditions and folklore of his homeland. Best known for his luminous paintings of Midsummer Eve bonfires, Astrup’s landscapes evoke the atmosphere and changing seasons of his home district of Jølster. Places important to Astrup – the old parsonage where he grew up, his beautiful farmstead at Sandalstrand (named “Astruptunet” after him), and the lake Jølstravatnet were to become the focus and inspiration of a unique and extraordinary body of work.
“Enter the mausoleum slowly and try not to wake up the mythical creatures. If they detect your presence, they will react to your movements and transform.”
Nexus Interactive Arts was commissioned to produce an original installation for Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Entitled “Forest Folk”, the responsive installation is an extension of the ‘Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway’ Exhibit – one of Norway’s finest twentieth-century landscape artists.
A characteristic trait of Astrup’s work was to project his childhood memories onto the landscape of his hometown, allowing his childlike imagination to permeate his work. The concept of transformation is a key element: from shape-shifters to trolls to other Norwegian mythological creatures, any part of his paintings can come alive, especially if you know to look out for these surprises.
NIA had carte blanche to create a complementary piece, drawing on Astrup’s central themes of transformation and mythology, and to immerse Gallery audiences into a world of magical landscapes where reality and the surreal blend together in unexpected moments.
Visitors are invited to enter the gallery’s private Mausoleum slowly, and try not to wake up the mythical creatures camouflaged within two impressive digital 4k screens set up as a diptych. Through the combination of custom software and motion sensor cameras, the artwork can detect visitor’s presence and awaken from their idle state to morph into a living and breathing entity. A hauntingly low melody set to diegetic sounds of the forest further envelops audiences, while taking them through a cycle of the four seasons represented in the artwork.
Every element in the composition was shot in live-action against a green screen, then composited in post-production to form the overall image. Director Matt Jakob creates a pictorial quality that allows the artwork to embody Astrup’s style, whilst remaining interactive and modern at its core.
Textile Landscapes – The Spaces Crafted by Alexandra Kehayoglou
A Beautiful Atmosphere – Claude Monet’s Ice Floes
The prolonged freeze and heavy snowfalls in the winter of 1892–93 inspired Monet to capture their effects on the Seine in a series of paintings for which he chose a vantage point not far from his home in Giverny. The river had frozen in mid-January but began to thaw on the 23rd; the following day, in a letter to his dealer, Durand-Ruel, Monet lamented that “the thaw came too soon for me . . . the results—just four or five canvases and they are far from complete.” By the end of February, however, he had finished more than a dozen paintings, including this view of the melting ice floes.
The Last Summer’s Work – The Works of John Frederick Kensett
The group of paintings called “The Last Summer’s Work,” left behind in Kensett’s summer studio at Darien, Connecticut, at his death in December 1872, was the subject of great wonder and fascination among the artist’s admirers, friends, and eulogists who gathered in tribute to him later that month at the Century Club. Their wonder was a factor partly of sheer novelty, for none of the works had been seen before, and as a body they were interpreted to be Kensett’s ultimate testament of his vision and sensibility. To the assembled, however, none of those pictures better represented the absolute expression of the artist’s distilling and suggestive eye than this, in which he eliminated any evidence of landfall but, in a way reminiscent of few artists but J. M. W. Turner, introduced a radiant sun suspended above the open ocean. “It is pure light and water, a bridal of the sea and sky,” averred one of the eulogists, and asked, “Is it presumption in a poor novice in art like me, to say that this is a great picture?”
This lovingly wrought study, perhaps set down in direct witness but more likely freshly recollected, was never developed into a finished painting, but became the obvious source of the artist’s “Sunset”. Along with “Sunset on the Sea” and a few other pictures of his late career, Kensett uncharacteristically indulged a warm, highly saturated palette at variance with the pearly gray tonality of his signature style. At the acme of an enviously successful career and in the relative privacy of his island studio in Long Island Sound, Kensett may well have felt a license that he had not previously to broaden, in his typically measured terms, his aesthetic vocabulary—here to include the richly chromatic effects of J. M. W. Turner or even those that marked the pictures of his colleagues Frederic E. Church and Sanford R. Gifford.
A Painterly Landscape – Edward J. Steichen’s The Pond – Moonrise
Artist: Edward J. Steichen (American (born Luxembourg), Bivange 1879–1973 West Redding, Connecticut)
Date: 1904
Medium: Platinum print with applied color
Dimensions: Image: 39.7 x 48.2 cm (15 5/8 x 19 in.)
Frame: 73.7 × 86.4 cm (29 × 34 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Accession Number: 33.43.40
Using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen achieved prints of such painterly seductiveness they have never been equaled. This view of a pond in the woods at Mamaroneck, New York is subtly colored as Whistler’s Nocturnes, and like them, is a tone poem of twilight, indistinction, and suggestiveness. Commenting on such pictures in 1910, Charles Caffin wrote in Camera Work: “It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their total extinction into darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes merged in half-realised, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself from matter to envelop it with a mystery of soul-suggestion.”
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