Portfolio: Thor Wickstrom
North Adams Painter Showing at Cup and Saucer
By: Thor Wickstrom - Jan 06, 2009
Thor Wickstrom Exhibiton
Cup and Saucer
67 Main Street
North Adams, Mass. 01247
Link to Wickstrom Website
Artist Statement
I paint both from life and from imagination. I'm interested the way these two methods of working complement and oppose each other. The knowledge gained from working with figures and objects helps me to paint from imagination. And the ability to invent, which is developed through working from imagination, helps me compose more freely from life. It gives me as much pleasure to respond to colors and light in a landscape or a figure, as it does to paint a metro scene from images in my head.
The work of the masters interests me -- the works of El Greco, Delacroix, Cezanne and Beckmann come to mind. These are artists who painted the physical world around them, but also created a parallel imaginary world of their own.
Medieval sculpture speaks deeply to me and strongly influences my metro pictures. I have an emotional response to those sculptures. I find that curious. The metro interests me; a subterranean world where people are moved from place to place. It's dreamlike. you are there, and not there. You are pressed against strangers in a small space. And then your paths diverge, never to cross again. It's all very dreamlike. It interests me.
The artist and model is another theme that I keep coming back to like a religious motif. I have a reverence for painting nature and painting the figure, and for the artist's role. it's something i care about.