About my art
Welcome to my visual universe
What are emotional arts?
If there is one safe characteristic of humans, it is that we have all emotions.
We talk a lot about our emotions all the time- at least when we are not in the ”intellectual mode”.
It is easier to understand each other when we are talking about what we are sensing such as pain, or feeling cold, but often more challenging when we want to communicate about social feelings among us. We often tend to use metaphors from the artworld like music or visual arts. Are you feeling “blue” today? because the intellectual language is often lacking expressions how we feel exactly. In my view this is where my paintings may sometimes contribute.
I have called my visual artwork for” emotional arts” because I focus on paintings that express fragments of our emotional human world. This is of course challenging in itself, because we are so different. We often experience different feelings when we look at the same picture. This is important to know and accept, because this is impacted by our previous life and what created the persons we are today. There is no right and wrong here.
My first years as an artist
I have painted for more than 30 years and produced many paintings, but I quickly learned that is impossible to please everyone. From the early beginning it amused me that there were always some people who liked and some who disliked the very same paintings. The amusing part was that -in general- people could not agree which paintings were good or less good. I loved to listen to the debate when people discussed this issue. This also taught me that artistic freedom is important, and it allowed me, from the early days, to focus on my own personal passion for visual arts
Another important factor in this context is – in my opinion- to be economic independent as an artist to avoid the temptation to repeat the same visual concepts in my art over and over again to make a living. I have always had another professional job which provided me the majority of my living cost (scientist, therapist, author). The backside of this is less production, but on the other hand, this preserved my passion for painting over many ears, as I felt freer to experiment with new compositions, colours, painting techniques etc. Especially I liked experimenting with the interplay between emotions and the intellect. Both elements are also essential in the creative process of painting and composing an artwork.
How my paintings may inspire you
When humans look at visual pictures and arts, the information goes -in a split second- first to the old part of our animal brain, before the intellectual part of our brain is involved. Because of this, our emotions are triggered first, and can immediately be seen in our facial expressions before the intellect is involved. You may say that the visual world is a direct channel to our emotions. Some split seconds later, we tend to struggle balancing our emotions and intellectual analysis. One of the factors may ultimately win if we cannot find a “compromise” making room for both dimensions.
Some years ago, I was encouraged to launch my paintings to a broader audience of people, and this is the reason for my present “relaunch” and this webpage. You may or may not like my paintings – this is not the point, but I hope you have a personal experience of value to you. I hope you will have both good and bad emotional experiences looking at my paintings because this is all unavoidable parts of our individual life cycles and emotional learnings associated with it. It is however not my general intention to provoke you in a negative way, but instead to enrich you by your own reflections. I therefore advice you not to focus on an intellectual analysis of why I (the aftist) paint as I do. I rather encourage you to focus analysing your own feelings and thoughts as I am only responsible what you look at, but not for what you see, feel, or think inside your mind.
The unpleasant truth about social trauma
The surprising truth about social trauma’s is that they are also found in normally functioning people. The severity of the traumas does, however, cover a very wide range. Mild traumas in a few areas may not significantly affect social life as opposed to more extensive traumas that are disabling both socially and at work. If you are interested in knowing more about the relationship between stress and trauma, I can refer to my book: J. Folkersen, “Understanding stress, the good, the bad and the hidden” which was published in 2018.
The book strives to be an easy to understand review of the latest research in the field.
My hopes and goals with my paintings
In 2020, I decided to retire at the age of 68 to dedicate myself to painting.
My overall goal with my pictures is to spread the awareness of one of the most important factors that makes us different as human beings. There is generally a lack of awareness of the relationship between social trauma experiences and our individual ability to “feel” and partly “understand specific emotions” intellectually.
With the new knowledge about our different abilities to “feel” and understand emotions, visual art must be viewed from a completely new perspective. It is no longer so interesting what the artist feels and thinks while creating that work of art. It is more interesting what the viewer is inspired to feel and think. There is no longer just one true interpretation of an artwork. There will be a diversity of interpretations from different people and therefore, it will be the total sum of this diversity that in the broadest sense is the final interpretation.
Different people will therefore naturally disagree, but this disagreement should ideally lead to a greater degree of acceptance that we are different as humans. It is my hope that this will lead to greater inter-human understanding.
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