The One

We “met” almost 5 years ago and it felt like love at first sight (at least from my side). Since then I wanted to draw this building many times but somehow the right moment never came… under those 5 years (doesn’t sound convincing, I  know). I always had a soft spot for old wooden buildings with charming details and this one was very old and really beautifully detailed.

It’s called Vastveitsloftet and was originally build in  XIVth century in Norway. After a few hundred years it was transported to Stockholm’s Skansen.

The surrounding is really picturesque as the building is placed on a high rock, overlooking a bay. If we have poor eyesight we probably won’t even see gigantic, grey socialist architecture on the other side of the bay.

The building originally served as a storehouse and maybe that’s why it was so carefully decorated.

What I find charming in a wooden architecture, are imperfections in the material: knots, cracks, signs of deteriorations, and elements in different sizes.

One day later...

Sweet, but… dark, desaturated tones would be much more sufficient.

And one more day... 

Gloomy, but not too gloomy (i.e. lagom gloomy). For some strange reason, this mood fits old Scandinavian buildings quite well :)

Animations

“Don’t ever get old. (...) The only thing to hope for is that you get so senile that you think you’re twenty years old again. That would be fun to relive.” 

Camilla Läckberg, "The Ice Princess"

I guess that all my personal works have one common denominator. Namely, they present solitary realms, environments frozen in stillness, as if life was on hold.

In the past painting such places was a kind of autotherapy or  an escape from reality. Materializing thoughts on paper made my inner world more "real", though the results were still quite ephemeral. 

Lately I decided to make something new with these environments by giving them some life. Just like here:

Bored with this introduction? In short: I made animations based on my previous paintings.

1. https://vimeo.com/130967262 - a full-length version (almost 3 minutes!) tells a story about a brave, tireless voyager who is traveling the world and looking for an inspiration (she is in the top left corner of this post actually).

2. https://vimeo.com/130965397  - a shortened version is a little bit more serious presentation of my works (a kind of an animated portfolio with a quite atmospheric music).

HD QUALITY IS RECOMMENDED.

I don't want to promise that I'll be posting videos regularly, but any support, comments and subscriptions to my Vimeo channel (https://vimeo.com/elwirapawlikowska) will be very very welcome and appreciated.