"I left the dense forest and came upon a pasture" Print

Born in Stockholm, Sweden 1954. The son of a master-builder. The youngest of four siblings. ” I left college after only one month... I hade been admitted to the Gerlesborgsskolan art school in Stockholm and somehow I made use of the temporary chaos emerging around my fathers untimely death in 1970." "At only 16 years of age I was probably a bit immature as a person and also lacking in experience with the pencil and the charcoal stick for such a school. But I had a fire...already at 13-14, instead of mucking about with scooters or with the football team, as my classmates did, I went to the Stockholm National Gallery and other collections and awed at the masterpieces, the Rembrandts, the Corots, the Zorns...This was my calling, telling stories with pictures.." ”During the two years at Gerlesborgsskolan I used my time mainly drawing in front of live models. Pencil on paper and-or charcoal on paper. I only did a few colour studies in oil paint during that time. You see...the professors were all good teachers and loveable persons, but during that period in time classic painting craft was frowned upon and not in line with the flowering ”revolutionary” spirit at that time... So...after also having seen the type of work that was granted entry to the Royal academy art school – I instead opted for self- education the rest of the way. Resulting in endless hours of mishaps at the easel, text studies and travel-studies. For these reasons I pretty much consider myself as partly an”educated” & partly an autodidact artist.” Debut solo-exhibition in Sweden 1977. Continental solo debut in Paris 1982. The artist emerged in the early years as an inheritor of European surrealism added with symbolist movement influences. Then developed during the 1980´s towards leaving the apparent style-trap of the surrealist paradigm, instead leaning more on the metaphysical content as such, but from a more personal /classic application. No style or -ism, just the importance of the vision and the impression. After a brief period during the late 1990´s of experimenting with outright pop-art imaginery, Karl Johan returned to landscape work as a parallel to the mythological realms already being explored. Since many years the artist produces two main veins of images; the mythological based and the landscape-based work, interacting to a varying degree.