Mona Grønstad

Mona Grønstad (1958) was born in Åmot municipality, and lives in Ski. Grønstad has worked with the watercolor technique for several years. She works layer by layer and lets the colors work on each other in the sheet. She has had a number of exhibitions in Norway and received several awards.

I use watercolor as a technique - it has a lot to offer. I think it has qualities that few people know about and can use. It is in the borderland between the strictly controlled and the soft dissolved. I find the technique interesting.

The watercolor is a technical challenge, and the process is time-consuming. It is slightly reversible once the pigments are on the paper. Working with watercolor is like being a line dancer, here there is a short path between disaster and happiness.

I work with events described with a viewer's distance. I am a storyteller without words. A glimpse of something in passing, seemingly mundane things can be a starter. These often remain in the head as memory images, they are processed by time, amplified or erased, and then resurrected through the painterly process in the studio. The image arises in a kind of development process, from the light to the dark. It all stages a conflation of a fleeting reality and a hallucination. Free of brutal elements, but still with a sublime charge of an inexplicable uneasiness.

Mona Grønstad grew up with the forest, so it also feels right for her to be able to use it in her work. The land-art projects become an extension of the watercolours. Everything eventually comes together.
In recent years, together with her colleague Morten Gran, she has worked on establishing an art festival at her childhood home in Østerdalen.
Mona Grønstad