Elements of Consciousness

 

^{Elements of consciousness/Reflection.
146×114 cm. 1997. Oil and raw pigment on canvas.}

www.uffechristoffersen.dk

 

I have just put the finishing touches to a front page for the new Corner catalogue for 2007. My first thought was to use a painting on the cover but I thought that the catalogue was almost like a book, an independent entity, which ought to have its own distinctive life. Therefore I chose to make an autonomous cover for the catalogue. 

It’s quite a challenge to make a cover for Corner. The Association is an old group with a rich tradition. It stands for Danish painting dating back to Eckersberg, Købke, Philipsen, Weie and Hartz. 

All of these are painters to whom I am greatly indebted, as I have studied their paintings for the last 30 years. 

Quite by chance I found a lucky-dip in Vejle, which was full of old catalogues from Corner from the last 20 years. That was lucky. The covers gave me an idea of what Corner stood for. The sum total of these covers have resided in the back of my mind ever since. 

I started by drawing several sketches. Threw them away and arrived at the final idea, a motif which I immediately caught on to. A motif that shows tradition and innovation, elements of consciousness for a backward look and a look into the future. 

A tiger motif in more ways than one. 

A tiger looking at its reflection.

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My palette

 

Mongolian tiger. 114×146 cm. 1997. Oil and raw pigment on canvas.

 

One of the most important things for my painting is the paint. 

I make my own paints out of the purest pigments you can get, mixed with a medium on the basis of linseed oil, which has taken me years to develop and perfect. It is a family secret. 

I take the classical colours as my starting point. 

Cadmium lemon yellow

Cadmium medium yellow

Cadmium orange

Cadmium red

Madder Lake

Ultramarine blue

Cobalt blue

Chrome Oxide green

Natural ochre

Red ochre

Titan white

Ebony black

 

When one uses the classic colour pigments, each pigment has its own inherent potential or character. One can discover in the pigments the potentialities which suit one’s own temperament. The multiplicity is legion. 

For example when one paints natural ochre into a white, a gold echo comes into being and an intimate sensuality, which can remind one of a tiger’s skin when the sun shines on it. 

It is quite safe to say that most paint colours die a little when they are pre-mixed on the palette. The best thing to do is undoubtedly to mix them directly on the canvas.

 www.uffechristoffersen.dk

Madness can be a wild tiger.

Art is a form of madness because there are so many risks in connection with artistic observations. The transgressions of normal limits which every artistic process presupposes can be fateful.

The costs are great. Sometimes it is a matter of life or death.

An artist who outlives himself can control his madness. Controlled madness is the true badge of an artist.

Through controlled madness the artist reaches the targets he aspires to.

Madness can be a wild tiger which must not be killed. One must make do with identifying it, hunting it, forcing it up in to a corner and harnessing it to one’s feelings and imagination.

 

^{Madness can be a wild Tiger. 146×114 cm. 1997.
Oil and raw pigment on canvas.}

 

A wild tiger must be tamed.

The tamed tiger will lead the artist much further forward than any school, teacher, drug or religion will be able to.

But as with every source of strength and development, there is a risk in playing with one’s own savagery. Sometimes when the identification and the hunt go too fast, the process disintegrates and the tamed tiger turns on the artist with its atavistic savagery.

www.uffehristoffersen.dk

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Ochre

Ochre Tiger. 114×146 cm. 1997. Oil and raw pigment on canvas.

 

 

Close to where I live there is an ochre pit which has been famous from olden times for its rich seams of ochre – a material whose use as a colour pigment goes right back to the Ice Age cave paintings in the south of France and north of Spain.

I am always inspired by ochre in my painting. The strong sunlight which falls on the yellow or reddish-yellow slopes makes them light up so one imagines that they consist of cadmium yellow or orange. The slopes make a vivid contrast to the cerulean blue of the sky. Dark green pine trees grow all over the ochre pits, and they are covered in a fine layer of ochre dust which is whirled up constantly by the wind, so that the natural colourings of the vegetation are almost lost.

But first and foremost it is the richness of nuances in the ochre material itself that makes such a strong impression. I have found at least 15 different yellow and red nuances.

One day I found a specially shining yellow colour and as there was enough of it, I decided to use it to plaster the walls of the house with.

I got hold of a shovel and drove my estate car into the ochre pits. Here I shovelled as much of the ochre as possible into the car and started the trip home. However I hadn’t got very far before the car gave out a scrunching noise and dropped down on its springs.

At my next trip to the mechanic I was told that the rear shock absorbers were completely shot – “You must have been carrying something very heavy,” he said.

In future I will only collect enough ochre for my painting.

 

www.uffechristoffersen.dk

More Paintings >>HERE

 

The Tiger as a Symbol

Tiger 146×114 cm 1997. oil and raw pigment on canvas

The tiger is a fascinating creature.

In many cultures the tiger is a symbol of the warrior because it calls up an image of power and savagery.

It does not have the dignity of the lion, but is rather a perfidious despot who does not know mercy.

It is said that if you see a tiger in your dreams it means that you feel threatened by your own powerful animal instincts.

Sometimes you see the tiger fighting with animals from a lower class, for example with reptiles. In this case the tiger is the top ranking animal in one’s mind, in contrast to cases where it is fighting against an eagle or a lion. In the latter case it merely symbolises the angry instinct which seeks satisfaction in its fight against every superior prohibition.

The meaning of the symbols is always different depending on the creatures in the respective conflict situations.

The tiger has a sly nature. It is not blind as is a bull’s nature. The tiger is more savage than the wild dog, even though the dog is just as badly adjusted as the tiger.

The tiger’s instinct shows in its most aggressive form because the instincts go right back to the primeval forests.

The tiger’s instincts symbolise extreme inhumanity.

www.uffechristoffersen.dk

ELEPHANTS

 

Since my childhood elephants have seemed to me to be the most beautiful of nature’s animals. Its size alone and its unbelievably beautiful head with the long trunk. Since my childhood in Africa the elephant has been the animal I prize most. If one compares the tiger with the elephant, as I have done in my paintings of the two animals, they are complementary to one another. During a two-year stay in Helsingfors/Helsinki in 1985 I visited the Finnish Zoological Museum regularly, where I studied their unique collection of animal skeletons. It was a great experience to see and draw these animal skeletons. It was especially the skeletons of the tiger and the elephant that fascinated me, because they were animals I was already busy painting. It is worth mentioning that the following year I exhibited at the Frie Exhibition Gallery with the artists group Violet Sun, with a whole gallery full of 2 metre tall paintings of animal skeletons. Many were shocked at this and thought I was morbidly fixated on death. The fact was that I was trying to get inside the animal itself. The inspiration for this was from the great English animal painter, George Stubbs (1724-1806), who is best known for his horse paintings, but who has also made many studies of the horse’s skeleton. To be able to understand how a horse stood on its legs, how the head rested on the neck and all the other physical things that a painter has to understand if he is to be successful at painting an animal.

He is said to have got a dead tiger from a circus. He got it home and made extensive drawings of the animal’s anatomy and skeleton. These have later been used by students of zoology, so precisely had they been drawn. Making these skeleton studies in Finland brought a new addition to my painting, it altered my conception of the animals concerned. Before this I imagined the elephant to be a big lump of flesh, and not a mammal with a skeleton like other animals. Especially the skull caught my attention, but not least the feet, because they were so different to the idea I had of them previously. Similarly it turned out that the tiger’s skeleton was identical to the lion’s and the leopard’s, the only difference was the size. After these skeleton studies I have looked at animals I painted in a different way, because I understand what their movements and physical build are like. It gives me a freedom to paint my compositions as I know what is inside the skin of the animals.

In these two drawings of a tiger and elephant skeleton, you can see the difference between the shape of the skull and several other bones. However, both are mammals and therefore have the same bones as we humans also have. From an artist’s point of view the tiger is a wild object to paint in contrast to the large calm shape of the elephant.

I paint the tiger and its stripes with long coloured strokes. In a way it has a visible skeleton, where the stripes are its ribs. This gives the tiger a certain volume on the canvas.

These light and dark stripes also give an impression of a dynamic creature, expressing power and savagery. It is accentuated by the colours, which contribute to expressing the animals psyche. On the other hand I paint the elephant’s volume with a single colour, which gives it exactly the right shape, while thinking about how the animal has been created. Thus it is not only the contour that I perceive, – that would give a hollow impression, but the whole elephant. This helps to give the colour the correct extent on the canvas. With these pictures I experienced that if the proportions of the elephant were not correct, then the colour did not work in relation to the other colours. That gave a false colour base compared to the colour base which arose when the shape was correct.

You can see the same phenomenon in the icons from the early Renaissance, called the Sienna School. It is obvious that they too worked with these universal problems concerning shape and colour. So each time you dive inside the painting and discover something new, you have the joy of having one’s gains confirmed in another branch of art. Used in a completely different context, however.

Just as the study of animal skeletons alters one’s conception of how animals function, it is also important to find the ‘skeleton’ of the picture to understand art.

In Avignon there is a very large collection of icons from the Sienna School which I have studied assiduously.

Fontarèches 20-09-2007