Roland Svensson - Study from Norrpada

Roland Svensson (1910–2003) Sweden

Study from Norrpada

signed lower right Roland S.
mixed media on paper
sheet 16 × 32 cm (6.3 × 12.6 in)
image 14 × 30 cm (5.5 × 11.8 in)
framed 26 × 42 cm (10.2 × 16.5 in)

Provenance:
Private collection, Sweden.

Essay:
This small study by Roland Svensson depicts Norrpada, the remote archipelago northeast of Möja in the Stockholm archipelago. The subject belongs to the maritime world that became central to Svensson's art and with which he developed an unusually intimate relationship over the course of his long career.

The composition is reduced to its essentials. A low, rocky island stretches across the horizon, surrounded by open water beneath an immense evening sky. Svensson uses only a handful of colours: deep black and blue for the island, a brilliant strip of blue along the waterline, and delicate washes of pink, salmon and ochre across sea and sky.

Roland Svensson was one of the twentieth century's most distinctive interpreters of the Stockholm archipelago. Painter, graphic artist, illustrator and writer, he possessed a profound knowledge of island life, boats, weather, seabirds and the people who inhabited Sweden's outer coastal regions. His art was grounded in direct experience rather than an idealised conception of the archipelago.

Norrpada was particularly well suited to Svensson's artistic sensibility. The group of low rocky islands lies far out in the archipelago, where the landscape is increasingly defined by exposed rock, open water and an uninterrupted horizon. In the present work, almost everything anecdotal has been removed. There are no figures, boats or buildings to establish scale. Instead, the island itself becomes a dark horizontal presence between sea and sky.