ERLING STEEN

www.esteen.dk

Contemporary realist painter, Photographer and Fencing teacher. Born 1945, Copenhagen, Denmark.

When I was a young painter I discovered that in some paintings everything fell into place like magic, while other paintings did not function at all. I thought that this was a part of the craft that I had to study and practice, and when I was good enough I could start painting something. It even had innocent craft like names like composition and balance. But over the years I learned that there was no permanent solution and that composition and balance is what it’s all about.

As modern painting, at the time, was a dead end street I looked to the 16th and 17th century Dutch, Spanish and French still-life painters who seemed to be walking the middle of the road between representational and abstract painting.

After turning my back on everything modern for a few years I began to realize that there was an obvious relationship between the paintings I was doing and early modernism and especially cubism, and that I, like the cubists, was working with cubes, cylinders and cones etc. And as the early abstract painters I realized that “form” composition and balance was not something to be learned once and for all, but the main, forever changing and forever challenging subject of painting.

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