The temperament of the landscape

The pictures for this exhibition were created in the Danish coastal landscape with a high sky, where the energies of the wind can be read in the changeability of the clouds. This is converted to images with the help of the materials of the place. Wood burnt into charcoal: the transitory here perpetuated as charcoal-dust on canvas.

In the encounter with the landscape, a release of energy and fantasy occurs that is decisive to the genesis of the picture.
Working in the landscape is not about imitating nature but about sensing and transforming what is seen into a picture, a picture that reflects the power and energy with which one is filled in the encounter with nature.

The fantasy that changeability and unpredictability makes upon the sky when the film of the cloud formations roll over its great canvases.

The Danish writer Thøger Larsen described this in a painterly way in his metaphoric poem Chance from his collection Earth (1904):

A night-black cloud lies like a brute
over the moons dawning.
It keeps a mouth open towards the north -
a point of the half-moon sticks out,
growing from the mouth at the edge of the cloud
like a glowing canine tooth.

Soon the moon will be just a moon,
soon the cloud will just be a cloud;
but that they will never be in this song.

O dark beast in the extreme East!
What do you desire?
For what will you use your burning tooth,
shining over sea and land?
Terror and life blood flow
around the tooth from point to root.

Soon the moon will be just a moon,
soon the cloud will just be a cloud;
but that they will never be in this song.

I put myself in the power of chance,
and now it is a monster.
I know so much intimate knowledge
but feel like one who knows nothing.
And if the moon is a tooth and the cloud a beast,
then life is a fairytale.

Soon the moon will be just a moon,
soon the cloud will just be a cloud;
but what has that to do with me and this song?

(Finn Have)

(Bogprojektet Winds. Niels Frank - Finn Have - Steen Rasmussen - Rikuo Ueda)