The Gallery on the Other Side - The artist and his reflections

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The artist and his reflections

Jöran Modéer

Ulf Lundkvist

Ulf Sandberg

Beneath the roof tops of Svartensgatan on Söder in Stockholm the artist Jöran Modéer, a lover of water reflections, lives and works. His life long dedication to art and his unique way of depicting what water is telling those who want to hear sets him apart as one of Sweden's most brilliant artist.

But let's return to the water. Where did this fascination to portray reflections and light in water come from? A calling that until today remains an important part of his creative landscape.
- Well, I have in a way always been busy with the complexity of light, he explains with a smile. By the end of the seventies I spent a lot of time in Fårö, an island outside of Gotland, and painted what you might call traditional landscapes. It was mostly dry pastel, but also some oil paintings.
Many years later, some time in the mid nineties, he found some of the pastels from Fårö. It was especially one that caught his attention.
- When I made that picture I was sitting on a rock, a bit out in the water. The painting depicted water against the light with reflections of vegetation and the shoreline.
Jöran discovered something in that picture that he never had fully explored and started there and then.
- I saw a potential, something that I could develop further.
Jöran says that there is a collision between the two dimensional and the three dimensional expressions that he finds exciting.
- I have always been a sucker for the decorative element in painting. When the impressionists started to turn their eyes towards the Asian forms of expression the decorative element entered the western way of painting. It came to be a big influence mainly amongst the impressionists, but also within the Art Nouveau, Jugend and all of those movements.
But the impressionists also worked with complementary colours etc, just like Jöran does.
- Yes its is remarkable that it takes a hundred years of art history to explain what I do today, but it is unavoidable. There are artist who has worked under the same premises like I do already two centuries ago.
Jöran Modéer also works graphically, with linoleum and wood. It gives him another perspective and helps him to simplify his art.
- There is an interaction between the two, he explains.

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