“L’art doit être sain.” (Vincent van Gogh)
I consider my work to be simple and unproblematic. There are no elements in it that should harm or provoke, there is no intended exposure of private conflicts. I use to think that the artist should keep a certain distance to his own work. I observe my own products and if a number of years have passed in between, the new view can fill me with joy or indifference, just as if it was the artwork by someone else. After so many years of modernist practice, I clearly see that many of the ideals that I still adhere to are out of the actual discourse on the art-scene. It is evident that the times we are living in have an impact on the young generation that we, the elder, cannot fathom. Although we are trying to follow up and participate in the new ways of living, we have not the capacity to absorb and extract the juice fully. There is new pop music and images that invade the media, the trends that change rapidly and the exposing of the most primitive parts of human nature. Of course this is a reaction to the old prude and pride lifestyle of the parents that we, in our turn, fell into after having realised our own revolt.
Slowly, in the late 1960-ies, my work became abstract after some ten years of hard labour going through all the stages. Already at the art school in Oslo, Klee and Kandinsky, Morandi, Picasso, Miro had influenced me, but I had to go through the lessons of Cézanne before I allowed myself to leave the direct contact with nature. Travelling in Germany, Holland, France, Spain and Italy brought me to the old museums where nothing new was shown. Maybe I would not even have been able to acknowledge the art-factor in the avant-garde works at that time. I also believed Paris to be the metropolis of art, and I knew nothing about New York or Duchamp until around 1970. It was not until my first visits to the Venice Biennale, and my full-time job at the Henie-Onstad Artcenter close to my home in Norway, that I really got caught and started experimenting with conceptual art. There was Sol LeWitt to open the gate for me with his white chalk wall-drawing in a black room. And there was Brice Marden and the mystery of black rectangles of polished graphite. I plunged into the books of Carlos Castaneda, Fridtjof Capra, D. T. Suzuki and started Zen training and meditation. The studies of electrodynamics from popular books have guided me into the worlds of the unseen, paralleled to the zen-world. These self-studies have not given me any competence for producing valuable work from which you could draw any empirical conclusions. My interpretation has always been intimately attached to my own limited understanding and even probable misinterpretations of the subject. But I still hope to create images that open up for the mind to travel at certain levels that are not quite common in art. My work, whether two- or three-dimensional, is aiming at the same goal as in meditation: emptiness of mind so that you can see things as new afterwards. This, of course is a very ambitious program, but should I be afraid to fail? The most important factor in my creative practice is improvisation. To create is an event that has to develop as far from my willpower as possible. The happiest moments are when the piece comes into being without effort. My own participation is felt as an executer of impulses in an ambience of wellbeing. I try to start the day’s work without any preconceived idea or plan. In my studio anything can happen, walls are crumbling and lines are flying off in all directions to join with other lines and patterns far out there. My job is to catch images that represent instants of this great interplay. I am very much aware of the speed and impermanence of existence and I am not trying to postpone the inevitable or prolong any illusion of stability. The result of my work should be understood as proposals, not definite statements. My sculptures and drawings are allowed to be far from perfect. I do not consider accidents avoidable, things happen; things fall apart as soon as you turn your back on them. The Japanese have sabi and wabi, the order of non-perfection. Let nature work, rust and use. I retire from the responsibility of delivering perfect objects; I don’t polish where I can leave it rough. It is not a method, it is surrender. Most of the human products create associations; often long rows of thoughts that are produced continuously at the slightest stimulant. Art contains symbols and messages to be interpreted and spread, everybody sees and understands differently. Sometimes a title will lead the thoughts a long way and sometimes a title will hold us back.
