Painting The Barn Painting

I am a Norwegian artist living in Adelaide South Australia with my beautiful wife, whom I was so lucky to cross paths with almost immediately after I arrived here in September 2011. I have had a strong relationship with Australia since I first visited here on a Working-Holiday in 2006 and the country has greatly influenced my life and my art. For me there has always been a close relationship between my inner journey and what my art expresses, and I can see how my art changes and develops in accordance to where I am at spiritually. In the recent years I have worked with an abstract form of painting, as if I was reaching for something that is beyond words and figurations, and in this period I have deepened through a practice of meditation and study of teachings from enlightened teachers. I grew up on a farm in the south-east of Norway as the eldest of two brothers and I feel very connected to the countryside. Even though my father and my grandfather were both farmers it did not seem to be my destiny to become a farmer. I was to seek out a different life and already as a young boy I was very interested in drawing and it became obvious to me to study art as I grew older. After I finished high-school where I was in the Visual Arts Programme, I got into a private art-school in Oslo called "Strykejernet" where I went for two years between 2004 and 2006. In those two years I did a lot of painting and really lived fully as an art-student developing my art as well as interesting friendships. In early 2006 I held my first solo-exhibition featuring the work I had done at the art-school. Together with my best friend whom I had established a great friendship with during the two years at "Strykejernet" I went to Australia in October 2006. After those two years in art-school we both felt like getting out and doing something else. We spent nine months travelling in Australia and we hardly made any art at all during that time except for a few weeks of painting when we set up a studio on an island off the coast in Queensland. It was when I got back to Norway from the Australia-trip that I really started painting again. The travelling experience and the fact that I hadn't worked much with art for a long time had filled me with inspiration and eagerness. I developed a whole new style of painting with motifs and story's that were very different from my earlier work.