Castello di Roccascalegna, Roccascalegna, Italy
July 14 – November 3, 2019
Stills of Peace 2019, Countries, Landscapes & Wool, Fondazione Aria
Text in the catalog:
Northern landscapes
Many Scandinavian artists received their education in Paris or Rome during the late 19th century. When the artists returned home to the Nordic countries, landscape painting was developed from depictions of dawn, sunlight and strong contrasting daylight, as it was common for the French impressionists to reproduce twilight and evening light. The artists also became freer and more abstract, where the place and the motif became completely subordinate to the light, the colour and the feeling. It is reminiscent of how J.M.W Turner worked with his water colours from Venice in the early 19th century, where his light depictions are the whole motive.
”My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.” J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)
The Nordic impressionists stories became melancholy portrayals of the slow dusk, when the light slowly diminished and turned into summer nights with a dim blue light. A light that never disappears completely in the north, which contrasts with the evening in southern Europe where the darkness comes more rapidly.
I remember how a friend told me that he had thought that a famous artist was so exaggerated in his colours. He thought they were not natural colours and that he always felt foreign to the paintings.
But, the same friend told me when he went home with the car one late evening something happened. The light was low in the sky and suddenly he saw tall trunks alongside the road, which in the evening light were just as bright orange as he had seen on the paintings. He had to drive to the side and just look around. Everything was like the artist’s paintings, orange tree trunks, pure violet shadows and emerald green tree crowns. He realised that the artist had reproduced everything exactly as it looked and that the colours were in fact much more accurate and descriptive than he understood earlier. If he hadn’t seen the artist’s paintings, had he ever seen the colours and the light at all?
Had the artist made him more attentive, so he actually acquired the ability to see and experience something very familiar and not at all alien, in a whole new way?
Everyone who has lived in the north recognises themselves in Jenny Charlotta Wood’s paintings. The colours and light are familiar. It is clear that Jenny Charlotta Wood paints her impressions from her upbringing in the north and her present life in Scotland, where the light is strongly reminiscent of what she experienced in her childhood. The landscape in Scotland differs from the Nordic region because of the widespread presence of sheep on the land that creates green pastures all around. The Scandinavian landscape is often more forested. Grazing animals also release the landscape’s topography and often create a stronger spatiality.
Entering into Jenny Charlotta Wood’s studio is like seeing diary notes about shimmering light. The light is the subject and the landscape depicted is the scene on which it is played.
The paintings are selected for a presentation of how Jenny portrays the northern light. When it comes to the light depicted the paintings can almost be divided into time zones . It dulls the daylight over green fields under a rain-grey sky when the sun can hardly be perceived, the violet light as the sun has just descended below the horizon and the blue shimmering light that is constantly present throughout the bright summer night. A blue light that removes all the details and only lets the whole of the landscape come out.
In other words, she paints what she sees and not what she knows is there.