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by Roland Huntford* |
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Lennart Forsling is an artist who has devoted himself to interpreting the Swedish mountain world. This is not the playground of obvious cataclysmic forces. It is nature in a quieter but still relentless mood. The Swedish mountains were gouged out by glaciation and wheathering of the Scandinavian rock shield. The shapes are rounded, sometimes friendly at first sight, but always with a forbidding undertone, modulated by enigmatic glaciers and the lyrical touch of river, lake and forest. It is an autumnal and wintry landscape. The combination of high latitude, a low sun and the misty Nordic air produces a subtle interplay of light and form that lends itself to water-colours.  Lennart Forsling knows this landscape intimately. Since childhood he has been mountain walking and ski-touring there. Remote, as yet unspoiled, it is a wilderness still keeping civilisation at bay. To penetrate its inner feeling, involves a kind of exploration, not excluding dog-driving and living in the snow. Forsling has gone through all this. It has powerfully affected him, notably with a typical Scandinavian sence of being close to Nature. Consequently, Forsling presents this mountain landscape from the inside, as it were. He is at one with his subject, conveying its atmosphere with a deceptively restrained emotion. He himself says that he finds his inspiration in the powers of Nature. He takes this to its remorseless logical conclusion. Not for him the quick sketch later to be worked up in the studio. He works on his finished paintings outside. That means, where necessary, working in sub-zero temperatures, to cope with which he has developed special techniques. All this comes through in an unmistakable immediacy. By his own account, Forsling has been influenced by Turner on the one hand and, but also by Chinese and Japanese landscape artists. The outcome is a highly distinctive approach which conveys the spirit of his unique mountain world. Lennart Forsling has regularly held one-man shows in Sweden. His paintings have been aquired by the National Museum in Stockholm and public buildings across the country. He has also exhibited in Germany. He trained at the School of Graphic Arts in Stockholm. | ||
*Roland Huntford is the author of three best-selling polar biographies, Nansen (1997), Shackleton (1985) and Scott and Amundsen (1979). Scott and Amundsen was made into the acclaimed television series "The Last Place on Earth". Huntford is specialist in Scandinavian history and literature at Wolfson College, Cambridge. |