good company
Portraits 2024: “Good Company”
2023 was a poor year for painting. All of my energy went to my work as a visual art teacher at the school. I was working almost fulltime and in the 4 years since the accident I had overburden the muscles in my neck and back and the tiredness caused by it brought me to the edges of my mental wellbeing. It was in a weekend in January 2024 as I said to myself “Monday I cannot go to the school this way, I cannot teach this way”. Although I didn’t leave the school completely, I stopped giving lessons from that day on. About 8 months later I had my retirement anyway….
In the same period, around the 2023 Christmas holidays I was reading the biography of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch by author Atle Naess and there were some illustrations showing his life-size portraits of some friends.
I never considered myself to be a portrait painter, but it seemed to be a challenge to paint some similar life-site portraits of my own family and friends. And so I ordered some linen canvasses, made photographs of my first ‘model’ and began painting. I was not disappointed and after the first painting came another and another… I was surprised by myself; I had never done it before… As I have some more friends and family members, I hope to continue painting thuis “Good Company” for a while….