Artist Talk
Interview with Marion Scharmann.

Marion: I would like to ask you some technical questions.
How do you work?
Do you do sketches or do you start on the canvas right away?
Do you start with the pattern or is there landscape in your mind first, which you paint onto the canvas.

Malin: I work direct on the canvas from an image I have in mind.
If I get an idea I write it down. If I would make a sketch it change the first picture I had in mind and I don’t like the idea to lose the first moment.
When I start to paint I use water and acrylic paint or ink. I spray the canvas wet with a small water pump and add the paint in to it and turn the canvas around so I control the direction and flow of the paint. This is the first layer the second layer I use oil paint to make the diamond shapes or lines. And after that more layers will follow with oil paint.

Marion: I think, it would be interesting to know how you started out?
how did you paint?
when you started working as an artist?
what was your first subject matter? Landscape, nature? How did it develop and when did you start to include this formalism, this color field painting into o your work?

Malin: I have always been interesting in drawing and painting. From very early age I had my own atelier and small exhibitions (age of 16) I had a clear idea that I wanted to work with making art and applied to art school in Sweden, In my case Örebro art school, which is an preliminary art school. It gave me an insight in different techniques and we had the privilege to travel allot, see what was going on abroad. At this moment I was working with images of microscopic pictures of the nature which made a small pattern. I took branches and placed them on the wall and ceiling so it looked like the nature was growing into the space. My interest for landscape and its process was already then in focus.
After my education in Sweden I applied to the Royal Academy in Stockholm and Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. I got accepted on both Academies and had to make a big decision. I decided to take the chance to see something new and left the privilege to go to the Royal academy in Stockholm. First at the Rijksakademie I started to stop describe the landscape. This resulted in less details and bigger fields with paint. The diamond structure was born when I came in contact with windows that had this pattern. I looked at the colored glass and saw the sky change with it. It was the beginning of my struggle an questioning of space in general. How to deal with the space on the canvas. I read about Mondrian and his decision to end the line just before the canvas ended or paint it around the edge. The decisions to continue a line or not, what speed it had and how it is applied are things I have in mind while I’m working.

Memory

Marion: Do you paint just general landscapes or are these real places, where you have been, which might even are connected to a special memory?

Malin: My paintings  are based on my memory of the Swedish landscape.
My experience with it and places from where I grow up. I come from a small town and it is surrounded with lakes. The forest was a big playground.  I spend a lot of time playing there and by a lake called Bunn.
I wasn’t thinking so much about the landscape until I moved away from it.

Later I realized through moving to Amsterdam that the feeling I had with the Swedish landscape stayed in my mind.  I spend during my time at the Rietveld Academy a lot of time trying to  figure out what my painting was about. I was working with images of places where the remains from a burned down house stood or with open fields where wild grass was growing endlessly and where a small path was made from the passengers walking the dog through it every day. I concentrated more on the relation between nature and human beings and the small things that was left in the landscape as relics of human life. Some of my work included at that time figures standing in a lake or in the forest. Most of the time the figures was turned with the back towards us. I took the decision to leave them out when I started to look at the landscape in a different way, 2006, but the figures remained  in my water colors. When my memory changed and I couldn’t remember how the people looked like anymore standing in the landscape and being one with it. I studied Cézannes ‘the bathers’ and realized that his way of placing the human being in relation with the landscape was so precise. The way he handled the people in his work. They got one with the landscape. But to make paintings now days with such a feeling didn’t make sense or add anything to what I wanted to bring forward.

Time

Marion: 1. How long does it take you to make an image like that one?
2. The viewer actually needs time to look at your images, once you take the time, you see what is happening in the images ... you see the constant change  ... do you intend this time of looking at your images?

Malin: Each painting needs its own time. Often one painting is based on the process made through previous paintings but mostly it takes three weeks or more to complete one painting with diamond shapes. The smaller work has a more clear composition and take less time.
I spend many hours with one work to look at it. I need to See and understand how the rhythm in the painting Works, that counts also for the choice of color and contrast between light and dark colors. Clear water/Broken surface is allot about feeling the rhythm and stream of water and light. Through use of earthy color the shapes are leading your eyes around in circles. If you start to look you will see that the eyes are following a curtain way through the different tunes  and shapes.

Color

Marion: Color and Form are one, since each square, with clear borders represents a special color. But it is not like you make use of (what we call in German „Lokalfarbe“) meaning the water is blue, the rose is red, the tree is brown with green leaves ... no, you just use the color as it is in a square, but it still manages to leave the borders of its square and in the imagination the blue changes into the water, the green into some reflection or some plant, so that is what I find extremely interesting ... how do you deal with the color?

Malin: Through working allot with images from my memory I make my own translation of colors that stand behind my feelings for the different elements. For me water is Brown and blue-green. I would paint the sea blue but I’m not painting the sea.  I go back to Sweden once or twice a year to have a look, to reload the picture of a lake or a curtain sky I had in mind.
The color are sometimes different but the feeling of the landscape the same. The Brown and green I use can represent mud and dead leaves on the bottom of a lake. The water gets the color that the sky and bottom have and turn often into a moss- green. The reflection comes from the sky and like waves it travels around and pop out to disappear.
 I try to not cover the light that the whiteness from the canvas gives. There are so many ways to make light in a painting. Either you add the color white to translate light or you build it up with layers and contrast
I think the link between American abstract expressionism and my  paintings are very clear. The work of Barnett Newman and Rothko help my work to find a place. I can feel the sensation that Barnett wanted to give with making his huge canvases with zips and braking the painting in two or make clear that the canvas has an edge but it feels like the painting goes on beyond it. The Total experience is there and this is something I look for in my own work too. I still think that I need to hold on even more to the feeling of a landscape. To go more abstract would place my work in this no man land. It then describes the fields and the power of color that associate to the landscape but not the inner feelings towards the landscape self.
With inner feeling I mean the experience with the landscape how it is and change with the time. What we do with it and all the consequences it leave us with.

Idols?

Marion: Which other big artists influenced you?
Rothko?
Barnett Newman?
Monet?

Malin: When I still lived at home with my parents and didn’t know so much about the big artist around me I was confronted every day with the water colors of John Bauer. I can say that that was my First idol. My mother had three posters hanging in the hallway of his work. While taking of my Shoes every day in front of them I looked at the images and saw something new in the three fairytale like reproductions. I was surprised that he managed to fit so much information with so less in his pictures. He also used natural light in his work. With this I mean he most of the time used the whiteness of the paper and didn’t add white in his colors. this stayed in my mind.
First Later on I got to know about the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Rothko.  In 2006 I was working a lot with the poetic feeling of a landscape. The land and sky was endless and I looked at Caspar David Friedrischs way of handle the landscape in his time. I got fascinated of the fine brush strokes and smooth colors he used. When I saw his work in real I didn’t have the wow! Feeling and was surprised that I got tired of the formality and loaded information he used with making a image of a landscape.  I thought the people and animals in the paintings could go away to leave you alone with the story that the landscape told on its own.

I started to reduce unnecessary information in my own work and tried to make a more clear image of the landscape. In my case I was interesting in the landscape in a modern, scientific way of thinking not in relation with God.
From there my work became more abstract.
Barnett Newman became  important for me in 2007. His way of dividing the space and use of color. His work feels like you take a deep breath and hold it in for a moment. To look at my own work and see how other painters used abstraction like Bridget Riley and Paul Klee learned  me also a lot about rhythm and  ‘the sound of color'.

Other artists that I think is important for my work:
Paul Klee
Sonja Delaunay
Piet Mondrian
Anthony McCall
Michal Raedecker
Cézanne

Emotions

Marion: Which I see in your images ... even though, they are not generated through spontaneous gestures, rather through a calculated placing of the color onto the canvas. Is that true?

Often the canvas is divided ... like in the one piece we are showing ... what do you intend with it?

Malin: Emotion have a role in my work. I try to leave personal happenings out. Things that wouldn’t add more to my work. I’m fascinating by the power the nature have. The weather has a strong influence on me. My work often change with the season. I can see the color change in a sunset as in my work. If there are more dust in the sky or pollution from the city or an eruption like the volcano on Island the sunset become amazingly strong
 (I read about the Greek scientist Christos Zerefos research about climate change using 500 different paintings made during the period that the Mount Krakatoa erupted in 1883. Most studies was made form J.M.W Turners sunset paintings. During the period when the Vulcan erupted he could find encasing red in the paintings made during this time.)

I divide the space sometimes in two as the smaller diamond shape canvas. Where you can also look at it in two ways. It has four clear directions: up, down, left and right or you can translate it into: North, south, west and east. This way of thinking comes from earlier activities that I have been doing in Sweden during my youth, running around in the forest with a map and compass called orienteering. You have to find your way with help of the compass and a map full of Lines and symbols helping you to know  where the water is more like a morass and small stones turns into rocks. I think a painting is also like a map where you have to find your way around through the different colors.

Perspectives

Marion: Perspectives is is another subject, I like to talk about – the perspectives constantly change ...
This is also something psychological?

You call your paintings „windows“? Why?

Malin: I use a flat perspective, not very traditional. Within the more patternlike paintings I divide the space in a background and a foreground. The background covers the depth but leave you an imagination of an endless space. It’s like driving while there is heavy fog. You can’t see the road more than a few meters but you know that the road continue. In my more open paintings with horizontal Lines I use the Lines to tell the distance. Instead of leading the Lines into the painting they divide the canvas horizontal into one or more spaces. Here again it’s about ground/water/horizon/reflection/sky.
Some paintings I call windows. This has to do with that they are representing a inside and outside space. Like I’m looking through a window into the sky or landscape. The figure is you looking at the painting and this takes the work to another level. Even if it’s two dimensional it becomes ‘three dimensional’ with the space and people surrounding the work. Looking at it as if it was a window.

New Media

Marion: Some more questions about new media? I don’t know, if this is really in your pieces, it is a (or a couple) of questions, which come to my mind rather because of the times we are living in than sensed out of your paintings .. but I ask it anyway ...
If one sees a grid pattern like that or if I see it ... I have two think about two things
1. about a technique of reproduction ... we did this in school ... you have photograph for instance and you want to reproduce it, painting it on a paper, so you make a grid and only look, what is in the one grid and you copy that onto the paper ... and then I directly come to my second thought, of course all our digital images are made out of pixels, thus units of color that in all make an image ... so do you refer with your images, which for me are rather very distant from the new media ... but do refer at all also to the new technology with them?

Malin: I don’t work with the grid as an link to new technology. I think about it and made for one assignment in Sweden work that had more connection to the pixels that a digital image have. But my work is not about measuring and placing the grid in a perfect way. For the work in Sweden I used a ruler to make every field equal and colors that was more ‘lokalfarbe’ where the red stood for autumn and green for grass and so on. I think the soul disappear within making the grid exact. I could use the golden section in my work but I believe that your own way of dividing the space and interpreted close and far away is more interesting and make the different between plastic painting, like Bridget Riley, where a form stand for just a form placed on the canvas next to another.

Titles

Marion: Most images have titles – referring to nature / landscape ... so in the titles you also allude to the figurative

What I love about your work, is, that they are so subtle, they don’t scream, they speak in a very soft way, but once you start looking you cannot stop looking, because the images keep on speaking and speaking in all different kind of languages ...
they are very Poetic ... very calm or even calming / comforting

You combine two completely different things ... a formality made of a grid pattern and a poetic, emotional landscape.
Why do you use abstraction to visualize something almost figurative?

Why do you the diamond shape in that image? Why hang it tilted and not in the conventional way?

Malin: It’s difficult to explain why abstract and not figurative. I think less is more and when it comes to titles this is where more comes in. I feel the need to give the work it’s right to breathe on its own. I don’t explain what it is but the title open up other aspects in the work. It’s not abstract in a formal way that most abstract paintings are but it is a portrait of different elements that take place in the landscape. I don’t feel the need to paint a rock if the rock can be painted as it feels; warm, cold, heavy, dented, Sharp or smooth…