Today I've been granted the Thorsten Björkroth stipend. I got to know about it a couple of months ago and I haven't been aloud to say anything until this very day :) It felt so surreal getting the phone call about the stipend. You don't apply for it you just get picked! 

Can't describe how grateful I feel! <3 It really is a push to keep on creating and doing what I love doing. The ceremony took place at gallery Kvadraten today and I had the support from family and friends (thank you so much for coming!).

Thorsten Björkroth was a doctor with a great interest in art and music and after his death the stipend was set up in his memory. His family was managing the stipend until about year 2000, when the concert association and the art association in Kristinehamn took over the task. 

A couple of days ago I was at the gallery hanging some of my own pieces, but I also got to help to hang the other exhibition they are showing right now. It was so much fun to measure, hammer, and fix with the lighting. The gallery is full of art pieces the association has bought throughout the year and next week they'll have their annual lottery for their members. 

This is really not a great piece of artwork (should have put more effort into making it look 3dimensional), BUT, the Thursday challenge is a great way to get your creative juices flowing. And in painting as well as in other things in life; on thing leads to another. Creativity fosters more creativity :) Creativity doesn't just appear (well ok sometimes it does but not always), you have to dedicate time to it. 

Also, a lot of people I talk to create these mental obstacles for themselves. They avoid painting even though they love it because they feel the pressure that everything has to turn out great (and logically it wont). Instead of letting go of the pressure, they do/paint nothing. It is ok to paint ugly things! It is a learning process and there is a lot to explore outside our comfort zones <3

Another day with amazing weather, just look at this! 

Magic is all around us, we just have to open our eyes <3 

I've been framing and photographing paintings today.  I'm not giving up, one day I'll take the perfect shot! 

This week is really going to pass by quickly; tomorrow I have my last Spanish classes, Thursday night I'll spend in Sthlm and Friday I'll be going back home again. 

The first sunlight in weeks - what a little vitamin D can do for your health!

Wood: I think they mean the material and not the trees so I'm thinking about either making something out of wood or painting on wood. Do you paint on canvas/paper or wood? I like the result when you paint on wood, but I feel like the preparation of the material is a hassle. 

An interesting discussion I've had this weekend is about how humanity is going to look back on the time we are living in and what they are going to say about us. Here are three ideas:
1. The plastic age. We don't make our tools out of stone anymore, everything's plastic.
2. The meat age. The barbaric and heartless time in human history when people were breeding an insanely amount of animals in the most obscure ways to get tons of tons of meat. (Thinking like this, I really wish I'd take the full step to become a vegetarian)
3. The materialistic age. That time when people tried to become happy by buying things (other than the necessary). People still feel empty even though they have five sports cars in their garage and 10 LV bags in their wardrobe. Shopping can give you a moment of happiness but it doesn't last for long. Soon you will crave something else. I have such ambivalent feelings towards shopping/money/materialism, but I believe that long-lasting happiness only can be acquired by a change in our mindset. 

This is something I started to paint in spring and it has been standing at Brogarn over the summer until now... I have been unsure about what to do with it - either to continue painting the whole thing, or to cut out the part I like the most. Finally I decided for the second option. 

This weekend I've cut the canvas and stitched it to a new support. The outher frame is in the making and now I will only do some final touch-ups. 

Old picture from when I was starting on the under-layer:

I like the structure of the sand and the wrinkles of the hand. I fixated the structure with a specific thick glue which I had brought home from Spain. As you know, in oil painting it is important to do things in the right order and I had to decide about the structure and the glue before I started with the slow-drying oil. At this stage it is impossible to change or add more structure. 

One way of thinking when you are in the beginning of a process ( a job search, painting, learning a new language etc) is that you are planting little seeds. They will not turn into flowers immediately, you have to have patience and water them before you see them grow.  Some of the seeds might not bloom at all and that is totally ok or even expected. But if you never plant any seeds neither will you have any flowers. 

I call the gap between planting and harvesting the time-lag effect. It is easy to be let down during this time, but you have to be persistent and believe that the results will come eventually. Never give up and if one way doesn't work, you have the golden opportunity to try a new one!