Steinkjer River Painting

Born in Norway 1956

Arne Borring and the Landscape Painting
By Tore Kierulf Nss
Catalogue Preface to the Exhibition at Gallery Tonne, October 2004

In art history, the origin of landscape painting is attributed to a small group of painters who in the second half of the 1840s congregated in the vicinity of the small village of Barbizon on the outskirts of the Fontainebleau forest north of Paris. Prior to this, there was a long tradition of painters drawing sketches and painting studies under the open skies. However the Barbizon painters led by Theodore Rousseau, insisted on carrying both easel and canvas outdoors, ideally completing their pieces on site, in front of their motifs. The idea being that this procedure would add life and a richness to the paintings which would not be possible when painting from sketches and studies at home in the studio.

The ideals of the open air landscape painting, of creating a canvas by means of continuous dialogue with the subject matter, gained a large following through both the era of realism and that of impressionism. Nevertheless, when realist painting again surfaced on the established art scene, after abstractionism felt spent around 1960, the landscape aspect was by and large a forgotten discipline. Neorealists often had a background as commercial artists, and used photographs as source material, or they painted constructed scenes straight from their imaginations. This approach to realistic figuration has in many ways sustained itself right up to the pluralistic situation we entertain today, where the byword is that anything goes.
Thus it is interesting when a painter such as Arne Borring revitalises the realistic painting, not just through realistic figuration, but by way of a painting practice in which the canvas is created in keeping with a continual, and sometimes drawn-out interplay with a decisive locality and the view pertaining to it. In other words he is endeavouring nothing less than waking the open air landscape painting after a spell of hibernation that has lasted a good hundred years.

Evidently, Arne Borring experiences this form of interplay with nature as something fundamentally meaningful. Otherwise he would hardly have endured being on station day out and day in, in all sorts of weather, week after week.