Spring in Provence Painting

Katrine P. Funderud was born in 1968 on the shores of the Oslo Fjord, where the silence of Nordic winters and the raw beauty of nature left an indelible mark on her imagination. Today, she makes her home in Provence, surrounded by the luminous landscapes that once drew 19th-century painters to the Mediterranean. It was there, at the University of Provence, that she earned her master’s degree in Art History, delving into the work of those artists who sought to translate the South’s radiance into paint. From an early age, the Norwegian countryside instilled in her a reverence for nature—its strength, its fragility, its ever-changing moods. This connection became the wellspring of her artistic language, nourished further by the discipline of formal techniques she absorbed during her studies. Over time, these tools evolved into a personal vocabulary of abstraction. In her large oil canvases, Katrine does not simply depict a place; she evokes a sensation, an atmosphere suspended between memory and presence. Her work inhabits the tension between opposites: the austere drama of the North and the vibrant warmth of the South, shadow and light, silence and exuberance. To paint, for her, is to reveal what she is herself—a meeting ground of influences, experiences, contradictions, and harmonies. Her paintings have traveled far beyond her studio, finding their place in exhibitions at home and abroad, and entering private collections in the United States, England, Monaco, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and France