Hall to Heaven Painting

Ulf Enhörning, born 1956 in Stockholm, Sweden, grew up in Sweden, Canada and the United States. At an early age his grandmother, Louise Peyron, also a painter, introduced him to the works of old masters at galleries in Stockholm. She told him stories about their lives and also encouraged his interest to draw and sculpt his siblings. Salvador Dali was Ulf’s greatest hero at this time, but when he later immigrated to Toronto with his family at the age of 15, he was greatly inspired by the mystical landscape paintings of Lawren Harris. At the age of 21, Enhörning was introduced to oil painting at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His first painting was of a nude, which he placed in an imaginary landscape of mountains and a sky full of clouds. Her face resembled a work his grandmother had painted of his mother. He became obsessed with this painting and felt the need to work on his own and quickly found a studio space on campus where the teacher would visit to see his progress. Later he studied briefly at the Victoria College of Art, Victoria, Canada, but did not stay long as he felt the teachers were imposing their views too much. During his twenties he experimented with colour discovering a vast world and means of expressing emotion and a simple but elegant technique for mixing shadow colours. Since 1984, he has had over 100 exhibitions in Sweden, Canada and the US.