Oil painting in Jolanta Johnsson Gallery

Oil painting on canvas

This is my favourite technique.  Oil paints appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages. These paints offer possibilities that no other technique does. They can be layered, unsuccessful parts of a painting can be painted over, and you can start again. In short, you can wander around the canvas and finally reach your goal, the finished painting on canvas.

Visual artist Jolanta Johnsson presents online gallery art in different techniques: painting, graphics and drawing. 

In the meadow

The finished oil painting

The artist decides when oil painting is finished. This decision is not always final or ultimate.  Time is an important companion for the artist. It is in time that my vision changed. I discover things previously hidden from me, and I see with new clarity the logic of the painting. Then the ‘finished’ painting goes to the easel ‘for further work’. At this moment an interesting process begins: I am excited to get to know if I will follow the same direction, the same path I started before, then, when I first worked on the painting, when it was being made. Or will I deviate from it completely? Ultimately, once again the finished painting manages to surprise me. There are many paintings in the gallery that I have returned to after several years. As time goes by, I understand more and more that Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa 12 years.

Abstract oil paintings inspired by nature

Exhibitions

The oil paintings in my exhibitions are the most important. In them, I express myself most fully. Size, colour, texture – these attributes give me the feeling that I am leaving part of myself in the paintings. In this way, contemporary art is created.

Man and the sea

Lost in color

What is visual art?

In my understanding, art is something incomprehensible from the point of view of practical needs – unnecessary. And yet it is. An artist is a man who feels the irrational need to make art. He doesn’t know why. The need to convey on canvas or paper (I will limit myself to visual arts) impressions, thoughts or ideas is so great that the question about the goal goes to the background. The desire to create something that has never been before dominates – that is what creativity is (as I feel it). Although I work within my limits, I would like to exceed them every time and get new skills. I know from experience that when I don’t experience a moment of intensification, during which I can tear down something I have already done, what was meant to be, I will not feel that I created the image, let’s say a modern painting. Art is this effort. We use to exhibit it, also in an online gallery or modern art museum.

Contemporary artists are free

I think that the process of making art for visual artists means that you can be free from specific problems. Boring, maybe some bad thoughts about other people? Although the artists are by no means saints. However, when an artist is honest with himself and struggles with his art in his truth – this is such an intense process that you can not find time for bad thoughts even about an unpleasant mother-in-law.

Man in art

Man is beautiful and good, ugly and evil. We are doomed to this duality. Without the tension between these poles, there would be no art. Sometimes I think the world of nature; plants and animals are so wonderful and diverse that it is not worth looking after a human. However, this topic keeps coming back. Figurative forms are present in many of my artworks.