...Towards the end of 80´s I invented a project for myself. The plan was to make some kind of "conclusion"
for my earlier ventures as a painter, or at least its sources. My idea was that I would rid myself of my
"luggage", a kind of painters catharsis, to enable a totally different future evolvement, possibly in a more
abstract direction.
The project resulted in a series of paintings that took off in my earlier symbolistic work and led into a much
flatter and aggressively coloured pop-type painting. The german painter Bernd Zimmer once remarked
that my paintings were "heavy metal" when he saw them at a group show where we both participated.
Accordingly, I named the series "The Heavy Metal Pharoahs" at my subsequent London show six months later...
...after having lived for a number of years in one of Europes most dense places, it became obvious to me
that the contrast in enviroment inevitably provoked and changed my input to those paintings.
Then, as I found myself installed in the Italian countryside, the "Heavy Metals" looked and felt...really urban...
Good as that might be, with all of that lush green around, almost invading the house and almost making the
air quench with oxygene - it was inevitable that the green and blue eventually would invade my mind.
The first landscape based painting as such, was a small image of a tree, just 25x25 centimeters.
I secretly painted on it and sneaked it in at one or two "Heavy Metal" exhibitions. It certainly became the
most shocking painting in that enviroment. As it was, my "heavy metal painting" era now drew to an end.
...The complications of trying to paint a landscape seems to re-invent itself continously, so accordingly,
the landscape-based work quickly became the dominant preoccupation in my studio. However, experiencing
what happened when one combined those wildly different types of paintings, what kind of additive results
that came out of it, wetted my appetite for working with that in a conscious manner, that is to say - to work
with parallell series of paintings and then also exhibit them simultaneously.
So, this is when I gave myself the liberty to "let" the red paintings come about and onto my scenery....
...Another thing that was revealed to me, as a result of the "Heavy Metal" series, was both my liking for
working with a sequential method and not the least for the really small sizes. Funnily enough I feel most
comfortable with either the ten by ten inch format (25x25cms.) or the fiftyfive by fiftyfive inch format, the
sizes of canvas that I do use and which comes inbetween, the "mid-sized" ones, in many ways feel like
more difficult to handle.
...My method, or the way the process of the landscapes is substantiated in my case, basically works thus -
The paintings are pure studio products, I am not an open air painter, or sketcher for that matter. The images
are reconstructions of images that have been dilluted and fragmentized over time and then, somehow, fight
themselves back into my consciousness. I like to think of it as the revenge of unparticular places and moments.
For obvious reasons, it is both too difficult and would be superflouos for me to attempt describing the more
poetical and/or philosophical values and origins in my own images - still, I like to conclude that as a painter
I´m more inclined towards the poetical than to the pedagogical.
K.J.Lilliesköld November
2002
