Where the landscape of reality slips into that of dreams
The forest landscape high up in Åsmarka has created a room for change for Margrethe Hauglie's approach to painting. Six years in this picturesque landscape has shifted the focus to what she wants to paint.
May-Britt Bjørlo Henriksen
High up in the hillside, the autumn landscape opens up, and a beautiful small farm reveals itself. Sheep bleat in the enclosure by the barn and a shepherd dog immediately demands the attention of all guests.
The view is impeccable, and a varied cultural landscape invites reflection and perception.
Hauglie says that she experienced a renewal in her work as a painter when she moved to Åsmarka.
- I hadn't found the way to paint landscapes before. When I came here, everything became so overwhelming that I just had to, says Margrethe Hauglie.
For the past four years, she has devoted herself to painting landscapes. Various landscapes from large mountain landscapes to close-ups of trees and other vegetation. Pictures she calls; afterimages, paintings where she searches for the essence of what is there when the landscape is resurrected in her.
Harmonized colors in each image give a recognizable expression. Although she has developed her own signature, evident through the way she uses colour, each image is different. She captures the variation in the different landscapes through her conscious use of light and space.
Turns the gaze outward
With oil paint on canvas, Hauglie says she tries to capture the light, and the colors and spaces nature offers. Something she thinks symbolically can represent the different states of mind.
From an earlier introspective perspective on painting, where she mainly painted female figures, she has been inspired by, or perhaps allowed herself to be invited by, the landscape to turn her gaze towards a deeper presence in what is around her.
For many years she has lived and worked secluded in the forest, also before she moved to Åsgrenda. But the silence, the colors and the beauty of the varied landscape on the small farm, a landscape where even the silence becomes intense, has fundamentally changed her.
- The pictures are a mixture of memory, dream and reality, they are a place to go to - a room for change, she says.
In that creative process, she wants to investigate how the inner landscape is affected by the outer and vice versa. Questions such as; How memories change, and what remains of external and internal images as time passes, are some of the questions she tries to explore.
Change
Hauglie has just prepared an exhibition of 60 paintings, which was cancelled, so she says that it rarely fits as well as it did now to get a request to exhibit from a gallery.
- When Pirjo Mursu from Galleri EKG contacted me, I had just learned that the gallery I had prepared 60 paintings for was to be closed, and the exhibition was thus cancelled. Now in October I will have an exhibition, Landskapsminner , in Galleri EKG at the same time as Veronica Lund shows her exhibition, Unreal sight, holding on .
Next year it will be 50 years since the Festivals in Elverum started, and Haugli has agreed to be Gallery EKG's festival exhibitor.
When Hauglie takes up the brush, it is a way of processing impressions.
- Then I get to know myself at the same time. It is a work of change, she says.
One of her fundamental reflections is that we, humans, are changing, just as nature is changing.
- We are influenced by our surroundings and the landscape we live in, she says in an artistic statement.
Margrethe Hauglie is educated at the Statens Håndverks- og Artindustriskole, the Statens Artakademi, Oslo University College. She has received i.a. Thomas Fjernlys Memorial grant, BKS material grant, Norwegian travel or study grant. She has had several solo exhibitions and participated in several group and collective exhibitions . She has been accepted at the Østlandsutstillingen, and taught for several years at Asker Art School.