Captured by : pg 3- lead
There's something about the fluidity and never ceasing surprising effect of working with watercolors that always seems to draw Stina Wirsen in.“Working with water colours comes very naturally to me. The fluidity of the liquid attracts me, it is light and fast, almost like writing or stitching. What is in the mind comes directly to the hand and out on the paper. It kind of just floats out and there is nothing that stops you. With other slower techniques, the process stops in between, which could however be interesting in other ways,” explains the Swedish illustrator, whose art exhibition Drawings in Water is currently on at Sunaparanta “ Goa Centre of the Arts, Altinho.
And while she has worked with mediums like oil, water colours remains her first love. “I have worked with oil before but the technique hasn't really caught me. Maybe I just need to find a way to make it mine, but water colours on the other hand is very similar to who I am and how I work,” she states. “It is very difficult to completely control this medium as the colour and water wok by themselves and the result may not be according to what you had in mind. So it is a combination of control and lack of control.” This unpredictability often means that not all days are good art days. “I work directly on the fine art paper and some days I have to throw away everything,” admits the illustrator who has been in this field for years after graduating from the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 1992. “I was brought up around art. My parents in fact met at an art school,” she reveals, adding that she has a lot of happy and not so happy memories of art while growing up. “ I laugh about it now but I remember once during a museum visit there was an exhibition centered around how life used to be in 16th century Sweden which was a very turbulent and political time in the country. It was a very black images of the time and the room was filled with these very human like dolls which I found very scary,” she recalls, adding that at the same time there was a lot of fantastic art all around.
Wirsen spent two decades as a staff illustrator for Sweden’s largest morning paper Dagens Nyheter, focusing on the Culture section and has also written and illustrated many children's books and animations as well as illustrated for various fashion brands, department stores, restaurants etc.She now devotes herself fully to her own projects, maintaining a vivid interest in contemporary cultural currents and expressions.
Her ongoing exhibition, her first in India, has been curated by writer and Sensorium Festival co-founder, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. “This exhibition has been a journey for the two of us which began six years ago when Shanghvi found me during his travels in Sweden,” she states. The exhibition has three scenes in all. “The first one is abstract or half abstract depending on how the viewer sees it and has a lot of shapes from nature in it. The second focuses on paintings of insects and bugs. I love doing these portraits as I find these creatures very beautiful. The last part focuses on human body forms which move towards the idea of fashion,” explains Wirsen. Delving further into the idea behind it, she elaborates, “Fashion designers and even artists have for years tried to compete with nature's beauty but this isn't possible because the beauty of things found in nature like leaves, the bones of fish etc are incomparable. And this is a tribute to what I find beautiful in nature. The theme centres around life or rather of being alive. While insects have a short life, humans live much longer.”
Apart from her art work, Wirsen also conducts art workshops for children all around the world and recently conducted one here in Goa as well.“I got the children to do an art illustration on feelings. The purpose was to show them how easily you can change that feeling. Just by changing the shape of the mouth or the eyebrow you can transform everything,” she explains, adding that she has had a lovely time in India and glimpses of her Indian experience will certainly find a place in her next exhibition.
