PRESS AND TEXTS
Pressrelease:
Beside the Sea/Sindhupara/On the Edge of the Sea
February 5-12, 2012 the multi – media project ”Beside the Sea” inaugurates in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India and travel to Jaipur, Jodphur and Kolkata. The project, inspired by the poem “Beside the Sea”, written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1896, will be constructed as a “ life – journey”, expressed in video, photography, theatre, music, painting and sculpture.
The initiative behind the project is Jarka Heller, theatre director, London, and painter and author, Anne Vilsboell, Copenhagen. In spring 2011 their project got support from the Indian Cultural Ministry in the form of the Tagore commemoration grant scheme. During more than 10 years both Jarka Heller and Anne Vilsboell have stayed between 4-6 months a year in Udaipur, Rajasthan where they have collaborated with other artists. Their wish is to create an community which actively and constantly forms itself as an ongoing process, where relations of unity and universalism are established; These thoughts are in thread with the thoughts of poststructuralists and theorists like the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, who has formulated critique against the tendency of exclusion and “the other” that is implied in the traditional sense of community. Thoughts Tagore already formulated 100 years ago.
The participants in this project are: from Denmark: photographer Emilie Lundstroem, composer and musician Thomas Agergaard, painter Anne Vilsboell. From England: sculptor Andrew Horsfall, theatre director Jarka Heller, musician Neil Maroni, from France: designer Paul Mathieu, from India: video and installation artist Atul Bhalla, sculptor Sandeep Paliwal, painters Shahid Pavez, Chiman Dangi and Kamal Sharma, actor Manish Sharma, from Iran: performance and video artist Ali Ettehad, from Norway: Helga Solbakken, from Sweden: photographer Reg Fallah. Further several Indian musicians, art projects with children from Udaipur and surrounding villages are part of the project. A documentation of the entire venue will be produced in collaboration with Footprint – Cinematics/Udaipur by Dev&Lovnism.
2011 is the 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore ( 1861-1941), Indian author, poet composer, philosopher, musician, the first non European to receive the Nobel Prize in 1913 and founder of the art academy Santiniketan, north of Kolkata. His anniversary is celebrated with several cultural events many places in the world in 2011-2012, as Tagore as world citizen still is considered an important guide, concerning the unity of world cultures through dialogue.
Further information about the project can be obtained by contacting Jarka Heller: email or Anne Vilsboell: annevilsboll@gmail. Com
What will you experience at the venue?
Installations concentrated on the five senses of man: hearing (music), touching( tactile quality: sculpture /painting), smell (puja), sight (videos), taste (food). The project is unrestrained by moral/religious preoccupations, showing that the world is an ever moving multitude with an eternal unity of movement.
The emphasis in the poem is not a controlling harmony, but a driving destiny forcing the self through experiences. One cannot know the design of one’s life, but be aware of a mysterious compulsion leading from one experience to another.
The aim is to give a universal sense of what life carries for all of us: “a life journey installation” provoking the observer to analyze his own life. Tagore was “called upon” to work on the true union of “East and West”. As an idealist he knew one has to struggle against antipathies, taking care to keep wide open channels of communication through which individuals from both sides may have facilities to meet in the spirit of sympathy = the spiritual organ of sight. Our project aims to open such a channel.
Venue: February 5-12, 2012 between 6-9 p.m. each day
Sculpture Korté
125-A Amabata Temple Road, Udaipur 313001 Rajasthan, India
Check: www.kunstonline.dk – Danish text
Colour Breathing.
For the Danish artist Anne Vilsbøll paper and colour are where the brain and the universe meet.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson expressed: “May we not conceive…that the irreducibility of two perceived colours is due mainly to the narrow duration into which are contracted the billions of vibrations, which they execute in one of our moments”? Bergson suggests, that if we could stretch out this duration – live it at a slower rhythm, we might see these above colours pale and lengthen into successive coloured impressions nearer to coincidence with pure vibrations. A change from quick to slow movement changes the habits of our consciousness and we perceive successive vibrations bound together by an inner continuity = duration.
In her ongoing series “Colour Breathing” ( 1990 – 2010) Anne Vilsbøll experiments with the very slow breathing performed by her brushes, the colour and her own handmade paper. Hundreds of tests have been made to experience the breathing. The same movement is repeated, but not two breaths are similar, as the paper is cut differently and absorbs differently.. The very slow movement changes our habit ofseeing. Colour is experienced as pure vibrations.
ANNE VILSBØLL,Danish painter and author, is known as a capacity, concerning handmade paper as an artistic means of expression. The past 29 years she has generously transferred her knowledge in books for Borgen Publisher, in articles, lectures and as visiting professor at academies of art and design schools, as editor and president for Iapma, International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists, and in her own artwork, shown internationally. Anne Vilsbøll is an “âme du feu”, who is always ready to help, when colleaques ask for advice about the many secrets of paper. Her energy is without comparison. In 1996 she organized the huge project “Paper Road” in connection with Copenhagen as cultural capital, where artists from all over the world showed their work in galleries and museums throughout Denmark. In 2001 she was curating the exhibition “Paper Revisioned” for the Art Centre Silkeborg Bad.
Anne Vilsbøll has worked on several commissions – among others the Foreign Ministry, Skæring Church, Rolex, Odense University Hospital, Music – and Theatre House in Silkeborg, Viborg Stadion, and the ferry Maersk Delft, sailing between Dunkerque and Dover.
She studied French and Art History, became a professor, went on College of Art in USA and has continuously enlarged her knowledge concerning her speciality paper in the Far East, Australia, Africa, North and South America and Europe.
In 2000 Anne Vilsbøll went to India to collaborate with Indian miniature painters. She bought a hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan, which from 2005 has been transformed into an artist – in – residence house: Makanne, where artists from many parts of the world come to work.
Anne Vilsbøll lives and work in St. Jeannet, France, in Udaipur, Rajasthan and in Copenhagen, Denmark.
THE ART AND CRAFT OF ANNE VILSBOLL
By Rachel Stella 2008 ( text from book on Anne Vilsbøll - published in 2011)
Among the many qualities of Anne Vilsboll’s mature work is its resistance to photo-reproduction. No photograph can lay bare the structural principles of her images. Nor can it do justice to the surface of the work. A photograph cannot even give much information about the shimmering colors in her paintings, which are harmonious human-scale compositions, let alone express the scale of the large and complex décors that she executes for public commissions.
So what do we see when we look at Anne Vilsboll’s work in its physical presence? We see its materiality; and if we pay attention we see that this material is paper. Anne Vilsboll has been working with paper for three decades. Precisely, she works in paper. The high color, elegant composition, and delicate touch of Vilsboll’s work renders it readily appealing; but appreciation of her oeuvre is enriched by understanding how she has mastered the craft of paper-making in order to claim it for herself as an artistic medium. This long apprenticeship transformed her into a connoisseur, an ace practitioner, a teacher. More importantly, it has imposed upon her the rigorous constraints that channel creativity. All of her works in paper have an experimental quality that is innate to their making, for they are created of material that the artist makes herself. This can be understood as a kind of tautological rigor: the material that constitutes the form being itself the product of artistic imagination.
Yet, it would be reductive to pay attention only to Anne Vilsboll’s paper works, for their prowess rests upon a firm foundation of skill and knowledge the artist acquired elsewhere. Early in her career, she experimented with the traditional tools gleaned during her beaux-arts training. After finishing academic studies, she embarked upon a phase of ongoing research that began and continues with travel projects. Each trip provided, and still does, the opportunity to encounter new skills. She studied the major printmaking techniques. She learned to weave. Perhaps this phase culminates with the publication of her books about weaving and the commission to make a tapestry of Saint Elegius – patron saint of veterinarians – for a veterinarian in Jutland.
Later she turned to paper, and her career developed as surely as did her technical understanding of the material and the possibilities it could offer to a serious artist. In the early eighties, she was awarded several travel grants and went to the United States. She spends enough time in New York City to check out the scene; but her creative drive soon has her hard at work discovering new techniques for making art. She studied papermaking as a craft and as an art form, taking classes and participating in workshops across the entire country, from SUNY Buffalo to the California College of Arts and Crafts.
As soon as she began making her own paper, she was able to appreciate and exploit its rich possibilities as a medium. Primarily this meant going beyond the traditional use of paper as a surface to draw, paint or mark upon. Nor did she ignore the potential of paper as a three-dimensional medium. Her growing technical proficiency (nourished by visits to Italian and Swiss paper mills in 1984) leads her to set up a papermaking studio in Hestkøbgaard, Denmark. Nance O’Banion travels from California and stays three months. They create the first papermaking courses in Denmark to focus on handmade paper as an artistic medium. Vilsboll becomes sought after as a teacher. The Borgen publishing firm brings out her book, Papermaking 1 – Handmade Paper.
We can date the first work of her mature period with the creation of “Swan Feathers” in 1986. This piece packs extraordinary affect into a rather abstract structure. The quills have a strictly structural purpose as spines to attach the handmade paper elements; yet they carry a metaphorical charge, allowing the paper to take on some of the qualities of wings. And it is just a short flight of fancy for the viewer to be carried off on the wings of desire. “Abaca Sheets” also dates from 1986. Though it continues the formal commitment to paper as medium rather than pictorial surface, it is a new departure, for affect and allusion have been eschewed for a more minimalist approach. Composed of nine large panels of plexiglass and paper made by the artist, the ensemble was designed to hang as a set of free-floating walls in a large indoor space. Here we see Vilsboll’s ability to make large scale work and to intervene graciously in an architectural space. She has used a subtle play of color, transparency and whiteness to occupy and animate a vacant cold hall without denaturing its function.
In 1989, another installation, for the Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, confirms Vilsboll’s ability to handle the challenge of scale. Here she took on a brick wall 4,5 meters high by 7 meters long. With a certain humor, she made a work of such scale out of 10,000 postcard-sized sheets of handmade paper. Her capacity to mediate an architectural space is by now quite clear, and we are not surprised to find that important commissions from institutions and corporations punctuate her career.
We mention in passing her first commission by Rolex, for her collaboration with this firm has been long and fruitful, and provided a showcase for her rare understanding of artistic décor. Her first commission (1994) for the Swiss watchmaking firm was for their plant in Biel. She handled a wall over 7 meters long in the manner of a baroque artist responding to the challenge of a palazzo ceiling by thinking through the special implications of such a large design. That is to say, having considered the optical effect of a large panoramic space on the viewer, she made a work that could support a changing point of view without ever, so to speak, appearing in a bad light. Thus, when the eye roves, it is not perturbed by the instability of changing perspective. Indeed, the absorbent quality of the paper dyed in the mass and the reflective aspect of the paper’s varnish soften and enrich the retinal experience provided by the simple geometric shapes, creating ambiguity in the figure-ground relationships and providing soothing loci for visual pause on a wall that would be otherwise overbearing and alienating because of its length.
In the case of most of Vilsboll’s public commissions, her skill is devoted to making the best of unwelcoming institutional space. It should come as no surprise then, that her most formally innovative and most delicately beautiful intervention in a public space takes place in the context of a true collaboration with architects and clients. In the case of Skaering Church (1996), she discussed the issues of light and space distribution from the beginning of the project with Johannes Exner, the architect. Vilsboll’s collaboration blends so perfectly into the program that one is hard-pressed to say whether her work on the 27 glass doors of the church should be called lighting, paneling, or decorating. Not surprisingly, numerous other commissions followed for this artist who demonstrates such an intuitive understanding of her client’s needs and expectations, and most importantly has the capacity to rehabilitate ungrateful byproducts of architectural programs (inhumanly large walls, unused and unoccupied transitional space such as halls). Such is the case in the many cheerful and welcoming contributions Vilsboll has made to such firms and institutions as ISS in 1998, or her Perspective I-IV a suite for the Foreign Ministry offices in Copenhagen in 2000.
More recently, in 2006, she set off on a new spatial adventure aboard the ferryboat Maersk Delft. A ship is a place of order and discipline: clutter is anathema to remaining “ship-shape”. Again, Vilsboll met the challenge of scale, not because the space she must address was so large, but because there were so many spaces to be filled in a neat and tidy way. The boat contains 132 works of art by Vilsboll. A few are prints, but these have specifically been conceived to punctuate intervals that can accommodate repeated images. Otherwise, the main reception areas are treated to large scale murals, each one addressing the theme of water in a different manner. Thus does the artist bring order and beauty to space which would otherwise be neutral and sterile.
For all her ability in working with public space, we must not overlook Anne Vilsboll’s more intimate pieces. Indeed, they emerge from the same creative wellsprings as her large-scale productions. Intuition and sensibility permeate all of her works in drawing room formats—we would avoid calling them paintings, knowing that many of them contain no paint at all, were it not that they are always mounted on canvas for exhibition. Earlier, we stated that photographs are unable to provide sufficient information for the eye to understand the surface of the works. This is not because the surface of the work cannot be captured by the camera lens; rather because Vilsboll’s surface is never limited to the superficial. Often, the paintings are built up from the inside. Vilsboll makes paper from natural fibers and then assembles them on a canvas. She might use paper pulp to draw motifs, use pigment to create color forms. She might have made the paper with textures, watermarks, a certain resistance or absorbency. In any case, she has at her disposal a repertoire of ways and means to create colorful mostly abstract imagery that is not limited to what she can mark upon the pictorial surface. An example can be found in News Eaters, where the sheet of paper functions as a refracting factor, or Banc de Fretar, inspired by a tool at the El Molino paper mill in Capellades, Spain, or one of her artist books Vice Versa, which cleverly reconsiders the interaction between sheet and sign.
In most of Vilsboll’s paintings, the colors are bright and energetic, even the cold tones in her several blue series. This energy comes from within, literally. It is the technique of building the painting from within that provides pictorial excitement. Consider the 1999 series Orange, in which tremendous opticality is created through the discriminating manipulation of papermaking technology: the ability to modulate saturation-transparency, shiny-matte, dark-light, contrast, hue without dilution, mixing, spreading and other problems that come up in working with paint on canvas. This is what it means to master a medium.
Vilsboll’s qualities are not merely technical. We mentioned intuition and sensibility; let us not forget generosity. Every year quantity of works emerge from the studio. There is not space enough to detail it all. Let us willingly omit the recent work so inspired by a whole new world which is India, and which promises to be as rich and multiple as any Shiva goddess, and rather conclude this survey by commenting on finished works which will not make the critic’s words obsolete as they evolve. Thus, we refer to several series whose titles are more allusive than is usual in Vilsboll’s nomenclature. None can properly be called homage, but the titles call attention to two creative spirits who deserve respect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Karen Blixen. Both are women, one a painter, the other a writer, and both led merry lives before doing their best work at a mature age. Vilsboll honored the visual artist in Conversation with Georgia O’Keeffe in 1995, and Sharing a Papaya with Georgia O’Keeffe in 1998. Karen Blixen, better known under her nom de plume of Isaac Dinesen inspired Vilsboll to such groups of works as Between the Lines“(1997), The Mysterious Writer (date?), La Lionne (date). The painter in New Mexico and the Danish writer have in common an interest in universals: both searched for timeless images to depict or discuss. But O’Keeffe’s modernist research into form is a far cry from Dinesen’s pursuit of archetypal plots. What Vilsboll seems to admire in both of them, and to emulate in her own work, is their dignified persistence and their commitment to elegance. They were creative spirits who embraced maturity. This is no small compliment for it means consciousness and awareness of one’s limitations. For an artist, it means most of all assuming choice. It is clear when one looks at 25 years of Anne Vilsboll’s art that she has made the right choices
Anne Vilsbøll paints abstract polychrome shapes with realistic elements on her own hand-crafted papers where the colours imbibe a rich vibrant life of their own …
By LISBETH BONDE 2007
Anne Vilsbøll does experimental research using paper as a basic artistic material. From the East she brings bast, from Europe cotton and local plant fibres. Each plant has its own particular texture that happily absorbs the fluid of the paint. The shorter the fibres, the rougher the textures. After a turn in the paper beater, where the fibres are reduced to small fragments by sharp knives, the paper can be moulded. When it is dry, Anne Vilsbøll starts shaping her paper bases, which can be very large. She builds these up like a puzzle, using the many differently textured sheets and layers of paper to interweave and form her rhythmic picture compositions. The textural variations and the many layers she paints onto the paper add a rich play of colours to her paintings. When the painting is finished, it is fed into a vacuum table, and transferred onto a canvas. It has taken Anne Vilsbøll decades to develop and refine this elaborate process. Anne Vilsbøll is one of the very few Danish female artists who have managed to create an optimal framework around her work and her life. Her art is based equally on her sense of beauty and on her ambitions and hard work. As a young high school student she was involved in a serious traffic accident that could have turned her into a permanent invalid. Fortunately, it did not come to that. After six months, she regained full movement in her body. As she lay immobile, suspended in uncertainty, thinking sad and pessimistic thoughts about her future as a cripple, she made a decision that was to become her life’s motto. She was going to live her life surrounded by beauty, she would create an environment that would allow sunshine and joy to dance within her. She has fulfilled to perfection the wonderful dream she had. Today she divides her time between both halves of this perfect world. In the South of France, outside Nice, she lives in a jewel of an old winery, with a glorious view to the mountains and the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. And in India, in the northern state of Rajasthan, she resides in a large and elegant house, quite a palace, on a lake in Udaipur. The author of this article first met Anne Vilsbøll in the South of France in the spring of 2007. The following text is the result of a conversation that took place over the course of three days in Anne Vilsbøll’s blissful surroundings. Here she allowed a rare insight into her working methods and her personal search for artistic perfection through beauty. But let us first present Anne Vilsbøll’s art before leaving her to speak for herself.
Anne Vilsbøll was born in 1951 and never went to the Academy of Fine Art in Denmark. After high-school, she studied French and History of Art in Copenhagen and in Aix en Provence. She trained as a teacher, and studied Visual Communication at The Royal Danish School of Educational Studies before going to The College of Art in the US, which is where she learned, among other things, how to make paper. Since then, she has been on a continual learning curve as a painter and paper-maker, using the whole world as her school and playground. She is one of the artists who knows most about the secrets of paper. She could be said to be obsessed by paper, by the endless possibilities of paper. With few exceptions, most of her subjects are non-figurative, in which Anne Vilsbøll tests colours and form, often geometric forms that overlap one another, giving rise to vibrant harmonies of colour, with preference for strong and intense tones, ranging from yellow to orange to red, moving to green and blue. Colours that bring life to the paper. Anne Vilsbøll has published three books on the mysteries of paper and given many lectures and held many workshops on the subject. Her passion for hand-crafted paper and her immense knowledge of the subject mean that the colours she uses can play and reach a rare intensity and depth. The colours are nearly transparent and range from the profoundest blues to green, yellow and red colour tones. The many bustling colours are a testimony to the long process that has gone into the finished product. When the last layer has been added and when the paper has absorbed all the pigments, as the greedy soil would drink in raindrops, the picture shapes itself into a poetic fairytale. The paper itself and the lengthy manual production process are just as important to Anne Vilsbøll as the painting itself. The background and the base and the painting are one and the same. They become “one skin” or equal partners in conversation.
The long journey from cloth and plant fibres to paper is the tale of the rebirth of an ancient craft clad in the robes of art. Anne Vilsbøll has set new standards for the possible uses of paper, from painting to wall decorations to glass art. When Anne Vilsbøll is working in her studio, it is as though there is a paper virus buzzing round the workshop.
Anne Vilsbøll’s studio in the South of France is rather like a cave, with a long wall, consisting of decorative rough-hewn chalkstones bulging out into the room. In front of the stones her paintings hang out to dry on metal rods. She goes back and forth between the studio and the terrace, pondering her next step, and when she knows, she takes down the paintings and covers them with a new layer of paint. Also in the studio stands the paper beater (the famous Hollander) which reduces the paper to pulp, leaving it to rotate in a narrow passage full of water. Outside on the sunny terrace stand the water trough and the frames for silk screen printing. Here Vilsbøll places the moulded paper out to dry. Out in the sun we make ourselves comfortable with our croissants and our café au lait.
Why did you originally become an artist? It is an uncertain profession, which demands a very strong ego and a good portion of luck, a lot of hard work and much talent?
“It has always come naturally to me to express my feelings and thoughts through writing and drawing. It has been like this ever since I was little, when my father gave me a doll’s house which I was forever decorating and re-decorating with pictures. I was never in any doubt that I would spend my life painting and drawing – and when I was a child I also wrote a lot of poetry. As a fifteen year old I was run over by a lorry, and I thought that I would never walk again. And that is when my dream of becoming an artist started. That is when my desire to create my own world was born. I became almost religious in that phase of my life. For I saw life as a gift that was given, and which we could use well, but which would be taken from us if we used it badly. I was incredibly lucky that I regained movement in my legs. If the six ton truck had not already been unloaded, before running over my leg, and if its tires had not been slightly deflated, and if the accident hadn’t happened on gravel, which gave, and if I hadn’t been wrapped up in many layers of clothes, because it was so cold, well, then I would have become an invalid. I had to walk on crutches for half a year, and had to do my homework and think my thoughts in bed. These were formative months.”
This experience of the proximity of death steered Anne Vilsbøll’s sensitive mind towards the arts. When one is physically hampered, one often compensates by creating one’s own inner private world. The history of art has many such examples. Frida Kahlo, Klaus Rifbjerg, Marcel Proust are some such examples.
But how did you come to choose paper and colour as your medium?
“I have been through several phases. To start with I drew and painted on all sorts of materials. I was looking for something that did not necessarily follow the logic of tradition. I spent a long time working with thin threads and plastic strips which I stretched across the room. I observed how the sun’s rays fell upon these threads and cast shadows on fabric and on long sheets of paper. It was all about the transformation of light and about capturing the patterns created by the shadows. In this early phase I was very taken by astrophysics and tried to re-create the surface of Mars by using modelling paste and old tarpaulins. All in all I was experimenting with all sorts of materials, including fibreglass, which I would beat up to extract the filling. It was all about getting the “innards” and the “skin” at one and the same moment. I was looking for a method with which to shape my own base. As time went on, colours and shapes and space became the focus. I am still exploring this. In the 1980s I saw the British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s experiments with pigments. I was very taken by the purity and stillness in his work. It was the pigments in themselves that created the form of the sculpture. That made a profound impression upon me.”
How did you come to choose paper as a medium?
“As I young girl I studied at the Department of Graphic Arts at the Buffalo College of Art, Paper and Prints (Anne Vilsbøll trained at various academies in the US from 1981 to 1984). Next to the graphics workshop there was a paper workshop. This is where you made the paper that was to be used for your graphic work. On the principle that what one paints on is as important as what one paints. We were free to choose ourselves how the sheet of paper (the base) was to look. This was a revelation to me. I had finally found the medium with which I could construct everything from scratch. You can make paper from all plant fibres. I could take off my clothes now and make paper out of them if you’d like to see how it’s done”, she laughed. “I am fascinated by construction, deconstruction and transformation. The fact that all materials, in the end, come from the earth and that we rework them, use them and then finally discard them so that they end up back in the earth. As in Hinduism, which focuses on the great cycle of life, with creation and destruction. This is the essence of the process of paper-making. Right from the start I have had to explain all this to people around me, and tell them about the reason for my obsession, which has taken up so much of my time and life? It is really due to this interest in the transformation processes – just like eating. We chew our food and we dispose of it afterwards. I had a Brazilian artist friend, who is now dead. He also worked in paper. Once he was in a hotel room and he tried to make paper from a cloth napkin, which he cut into tiny pieces and chewed. He pressed the finished pulp onto a match, thus producing a very small tree. He created a huge installation consisting of two thousand tiny trees each made from chewed paper.
Man has always expressed himself on clay, on tablets, on metal, on animal skins; they have scratched onto bark and leaves, until the invention of paper two thousand years ago. This historical dimension is interesting and appeals to me. The history of all phenomena interests me”.
But today we use electronic media more and more. Does this trend increasingly make paper superfluous?
“On the contrary, the paper industry is producing more paper than ever. Everyone uses their printers and even the National Archives have to keep all their documents on paper, as no-one knows whether digital storage is going to work in the long run – and if we shall then have a future without history. No doubt that paper has a productive future ahead of it. This is something which is discussed internationally, also when one talks about the restoration of works on paper and the problems involved with preserving them for the future. I didn’t know any of this when I started with paper. But I soon realised the importance of this material. In Denmark, they had no idea how to place my art in the beginning. They simply knew nothing about works of art on hand-made paper. Were these bona fide, durable works of art? Experiments at the School of Curators turned out very positively. My paintings on paper vacuum-pressed onto canvas are just as durable as ordinary oil and acrylic paintings”.
Your works have been bought by The Committee of the Nationals Arts Foundation for Crafts and Design, and you have also received grants from the Committee of Pictorial Arts, and you exhibit in picture galleries. Do you experience diverse attitudes to your work?
“Mostly this happened in the beginning when I first came back from the States and started exhibiting my work. No-one in Denmark was working with paper as an artistic medium. Students at the Danish academies of art did not learn, and are still not learning anything about paper, as one does in the US, in Germany and in other art schools round the world. One can often see beautiful drawings shown in exhibitions which have been drawn on the same sort of paper as schoolchildren use for maths homework. I was viewed with suspicion and so was my work. Firstly I had not been trained in Denmark, which meant that I had no colleagues who really knew me. And then there were those who thought my work was merely a passing fashion, or a fancy idea! I felt that their disapproval was based on ignorance and antiquated academic attitudes. After all, Denmark is not the only place where one can train to become and artist! But after ten years or so of hard work I didn’t experience such restricted reactions to my work. My background is a real mixture of many elements, which I feel have been an advantage for my career. For the last 15 years I have made a good living from my art and have had many wonderful commissions. I am disciplined and work in my studio every day. I get very restless if I haven’t worked for a few days. The most important thing is that I have a passion. To believe in oneself and continue working. Other people’s opinions are after all not what life is about. It took ten years, and then they called me a pioneer in my field: hand-crafted paper as an artistic medium.
An artist needs somebody to communicate his or her art to the public. Whether one is accepted on all levels of the artistic hierarchy depends on who does the marketing and how. It seems to be more important now than ever whether one moves in the right circles and meets the right people who can promote one’s work. I have lived mainly abroad all these years. I do not have a constant circle of colleagues in Denmark – I do not belong to any particular group. My artistic peer group is international. I have not cultivated the inner circle of Denmark’s art scene. I never set out to plan a strategy for the promotion of my work. I have had many opportunities, but have not always made the right strategic choices. I have had many exhibitions in museums, and have worked with many galleries, who have to a greater or lesser degree done something to promote me. In between I could have made better choices. But I have mostly allowed myself to be led by people I found sympathetic as human beings, and right from the start I have been lucky to receive many invitations. I have never had to ask a gallery if they wanted to show my work. It has been them who got in touch with me.
The most important thing for me has been the peace and quiet necessary to work and move around the world. I would prefer chatting to a butcher than another artist. I would like to learn things I do not already know. I am too proud to ask for anything and like to find my own way.
A museum director, whilst giving the opening speech at one of my shows, declared there was nothing to be said about my work. He told a story about an experience he had had whilst on a walk in the woods with some friends. They had reached the top of a hill. From here they could see an enormous flock of deer in the distance. There were hundreds of them. But they could not hear them. They wondered how they could hear nothing when the flock of deer was so large. This was what my pictures were like, he said: they create wonder and silence. As when you read a surreal poem. I thought this was the most beautiful thing I had heard for a long time; that is just what I want to achieve; to create stillness that trembles and vibrates like breath. To paint is to fill a room in a beautiful way; that, for me, is art.”
Can you tell us how you work?
“I always make my starting point an experience that fascinates or surprises me. It could be for example that I had seen a leopard in the dark of night. I start by making a realistic drawing of the experience. Then I isolate, I dissect and simplify the realistic drawing to clear, pure shapes that capture the form and movement. When the sketch is done, I decide where the colours should be most intense, transparent or colour-washed, or something else, and then I create my sheets of paper, so that they absorb the colours in their different ways. When the large sheet of paper is finished, I paint and layer the surface, and then saturate the surface, layer upon layer upon layer. In between I allow certain figurative elements to stand out when I want to stress or underline elements of the story I am telling. I can work for a very long time with one particular experience. I study it from all angles, read and gather more knowledge about whatever it is I am working on at that given point. I create my own projects which then slowly lead me to yet other projects. This is the joy of continuous work – it never comes to an end, there will always be new avenues to explore.
I am deeply interested in building tableaux, where one can step into the painting and where the painting itself is mirrored in the floor in carpets on the floor – a project I am working on at the moment with an Indian weaver, who makes carpets based on my sketches and paintings. What I love best is working with paintings relating to specific spaces. My work is moving more and more in the direction of creating art in rooms, where the painting is in dialogue with other elements in the room – I have begun to create sculptures and other objects that can enter into this dialogue with the paintings.”
You live a nomadic existence between India, the South of France and Denmark. What do these extremes, and your commuting between them, add to your art?
“First and foremost the opportunity to reflect upon what I am actually doing. If you always stay in the same place you can end up in a false sense of security and routine. It is like a centrifuge that hurls me in every which direction when I change place and culture the way I do. And I am also very curious to see what my experiences do to me along the way. It is very exciting. I used to always travel to new places, I had to constantly see new things. But the older I get and the more I have travelled, the more I want to return to the same places. This allows me the possibility of dreaming in a different and more profound way. This is something I noticed in particular after buying a place in India in 2001. In India my thoughts are rid of their ingrained habits, and I am able to break the bonds of convention. I do not have to do so much, but I can think and write and paint in a totally different way. In India I am able to look at myself from the outside. These days I like to come back to the same familiar places – and I feel just as much at home in Udaipur as I do in France and Denmark. I am visually stimulated in India. Every single time I am there, new spaces open up behind the old ones. It is just like in my paintings, where I build rooms within rooms.
Apart from everything else, there is so much happiness and hope everywhere in India. No matter how poor people are, they seem to find and cherish hope in the most appalling conditions. We in the West could learn a lot from them. The Indians say “Hota Hai” which means “It happens”. By this they mean that what will happen in the future is always better than what has happened. But one should never forget that one is European and has a particular and different frame of reference than the Indians. Sensitive souls can easily lose themselves and “go native”. Indians find it rather amusing when foreigners “Gora” look like Indians after a week in their country. Many hippies are and were like this. I experience great respect on their part as I have kept my integrity and still am the person I was when I arrived. I can live my life there in peace, whilst at the same time being very interested in India and Indian culture. I have just read the Indian best-seller “Being Indian” by the Indian writer Pavan K. Varmas. It describes among other things Indian know-how and talents on the IT front. They are amazingly talented at finding systems in closed circuits. Their ability to see the grand scheme of things and to find practical ways of overcoming difficulties is simply formidable. On the other hand, they can sometimes find it difficult to integrate external ideas, because of their preference for closed systems. Let me give you an example from my own work. When I was collaborating with some very talented miniature painters, who were going to paint my stories, they found it extremely difficult to understand what my stories were about. When I told them “I want you to paint a man and a woman standing face to face. I want water to be pouring out of each of their bodily orifices so the body comes to function as a fountain,” they answered ”Anne, you have a very different mind”. They were totally unable to translate my words into images. This was a true clash of cultures. The tradition of miniature painting is to copy from historical originals. They are only geniuses at running with the idea if you explain to them exactly what to do. India is a country steeped in centuries’ old rituals as well as ultra modern technologies. Family is the most important thing for all Indians. The people next door are less important. That is a less sympathetic characteristic. But there is a fundamental human optimism which runs through everything and I like that!”
How have you experienced the Indian caste system?
“It is slowly disappearing in the big cities, but still exists in certain situations. My cook, who is originally from Nepal, was also hired to do the cleaning. But he never touches the bathrooms or toilets. Someone from a lower caste has to do that.
You may be a highly educated Indian in England, but your mother tells you to come home and marry “one of us”, you do what she says. One generally marries someone from the same caste. It will take many years before this system disappears completely, because it is such an ancient and ingrained tradition. Every sixth person you meet in this world is an Indian. Most people always talk about the poverty when conversation turns to India. But India has everything – the richest people in the world live in India and the middle-class is growing rapidly. It is a country developing at an extraordinary rate and it is very exciting to watch this at close quarters.”
Going back to the West and your art, I’d like to ask you about the sources of your artistic inspirations?
“There are so many that you would need an entire encyclopaedia to get through them. But what has inspired me and still inspires me most are the artists who express themselves using untraditional materials. More than anything I have been inspired by individual artists who have supported themselves and been successful by virtue of their art. My inspiration has mostly come from America. It was Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine who were the first to show works on hand-crafted paper at MOMA. The way Robert Rauschenberg groups his pictures – his “combines” – fascinates me. Louise Nevelson’s use of wood to construct huge cubist reliefs, Louise Bourgeois’ use of material in her installations. But I also think Rodin’s and Chillidas’ sculptures are awesome, because they are pure and silent.
I also find inspiration in the worlds of music and film. In the USA it was Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass. I have often painted my compositions to the rhythm and tones of music. I have made many music pictures in my time.
Furthermore I would like to mention a pioneer like Georgia O’Keefe. I was fortunate enough to visit her in New Mexico, and I have let myself be inspired by her, more by her as a person than as an artist, however. The fact that she started out as a teacher, like myself, and then became an artist to such a degree that she moved out to live in the desert and cultivate and refine her art is impressive. And it is equally interesting to see how she was fulfilled in life by her art. Also a person like Karen Blixen has inspired me. All in all, women artists who, like myself, have been strong enough to be able to live alone with themselves and their thoughts. And literature of course – I read lots of books!
I do not find provocative art interesting. It is the solid, monumental and above all, the silence in a work of art that I find the most important.”
Which direction is your work taking?
My direction changes in a constant spiral in direct proportion to my work. I do not wish to be categorised in any way. First and foremost working has to be interesting and exciting for myself. It is after all my whole life!
Paper is today my technique. I have experimented so much in this field that, the way I see it, there are no more experiments to be done. But one should never say never! I use paper the way I use my brushes, my pigments and my binding agents. I use the paper as a base for the painting, and it has taken me ages to work out quite how to apply my method the way I wanted it. When I stepped down as President of the IAPMA – the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists in the year 2000, I had spent 17 years actively experimenting, promoting, studying and communicating on a global basis on behalf of the art of paper. In the past seven years, I have been particularly absorbed by the spatial quality of painting, its positioning in a room, and the way it communicates with other elements in the room. One might be tempted to call it the three-dimensional quality of painting. But no matter where the needle of the compass points, I do not think I shall ever let go of the paper. It is essential to my work. I shall always seek to construct my own world, my own satellite, this has always been my fixed course, and will always continue to be so. I belong more to the world than to a specific point in the world. Times change. Once everything an artist produced had to be recognisable. Today nothing is allowed to be recognisable – it has to be different – that is the archetype we are running with now. Once you have made your mark and gained a foothold, the fan opens. I have terrific freedom of choice and am always examining the world and its diversity. And I will continue to do so as long as I possibly can – painting on paper and letting my paintings determine how to communicate with other elements in space. This is my life.”
ORANGE PAPERS.
Text by Isabelle Spaak in “Cimaise, Contemporary Art, N. 258/ 1999
”Imagine. You are lying down. Quietly. Alone on the beach. Your face turned to the sun. You squeeze up your eyes. A soft light acts a screen between your eyelids and the sky. What colour is it? Orange of course. Start again. There you are at day’s end, on a hill overlooking the sea. Look into the distance. The narrow line of the horizon is taking on colour. Orange once more. And the next morning, when day breaks, the shading will be the same. The beach is in Sri Lanka. So is the mountain. It is through these minute sensations felt in the heat of an Asian country, that Anne Vilsbøll undertook her work on orange. In this country which she did not know, in the midst of a rampant nature she was discovering, orange caught up with her. Snatched her up. As if by accident. Like a meeting with someone you were not impressed by, but who suddenly appears fascinating. Where did this obsession come from, for a colour which is so often reviled, half-way between vulgarity and an alarm signal? From a wish to change? From a wish to move away from blues, ochres, and reds, which are so seductive that for a long time now, they earned her the unconditional marvelling of her admirers. From need to prove that immediate attraction is not necessarily essential? That sometimes it is best to look further afield before discovering a less obvious charm?
Anne Vilsbøll is close to Karen Blixen (whom she admirers). To prove that one can be one and, at the same time, another, at the end of her life the writer enjoyed wearing masks and exuberant hats. By constantly creating new characters, she wanted to disturb those who thought they knew her. There is quite a lot of that attitude in Anne Vilsbøll’s quest.
The artist files away, seeks, photographs, draws, muses. Like a collector she piles up words, images, impressions, anything which can be linked to this “non decorative” colour. “I like its independence and its indifference. It does not ask to be loved. It exists by itself.” An interest that no doubt symbolises Anne Vilsbøll’s maturity. Best known in Denmark for her work on handmade paper, she no longer seeks recognition. She knows who she is. To prove it, she allows herself great freedom in her use of forms. Now softer, they have evolved from the angular constructions, which made up her compositions. “ I can finally attempt the circle,” she says. The perfect shape contains all the others. Particularly difficult, it no longer frightens her. Orange is a colour but also a nicely rounded fruit…..
Is this a coincidence? Not necessarily….
The artist works on paper in the same frame of mind. As through imposing order on the original chaos, she builds from fibres, she has selected with infinite care before she grinds them down and turns them into pulp. She chooses them by travelling all over the world, from Zimbabwe to Japan, by way of Burma. This choice determines the grain of paper, which she will make in her native Denmark. It is the basis of the stories, she imagines. The one we find seductive tells of a collector’s secret. The first grainy sheet, a Chinese mandarin, his orange toga and a box. Second episode and another paper, as fine as silk, the box, trapezoidal and flowered, outlined by a black stroke made from vegetable extract, placed on a red background. The last chapter, the breaking out. The mysterious content blossoms on a grainy surface mixing orange and green. Three ways of broaching a subject without ever needing a link, except the one the viewer chooses to give it. Anne Vilsbøll thinks of creation in a spirit of intense freedom. That is the driving force behind her use of paper, a medium, she can recompose by herself, and in any kind of natural milieu, using whatever comes to hand, without being subjected to a canvas or a layout. A desire to travel her own path so as to arrive where she is least expected. A path she places under the auspices of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her meeting with the American artist living alone and self-contained in the hills of New Mexico, sums up her conception of art. After long months spent trying to get close to the great lady of modern American art, their meeting face-to-face was simple, natural, easy. Without speechifying and without any useless words. It is with a similar greed and the sincerity of a light hearted, but intense look she approaches her work today. Orange all over.”
Extract from the catalogue text for the exhibition “La Lionne” 1997 by Jørgen Hansen, MA and art critic at the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten:
“A paradoxial meeting between two women, the great story-teller and the painter who most of all wanted to tell a story, and who works with colour and form on the basis of the conceptions created by Blixen. It is not only a literary transformation – the written word to the wordless painting – but just as much the poet’s words interpreted through the sensitive mind of a different artist.
Karen Blixen defines the identity of a lion hunter as being one that compares with the greatest of challenges and yields to its destiny. Undeniably a magnificent vision, challenging for the whole of human life, but hardly attainable in the everyday life that is the lot of most people. However, in the dream-world of art it must necessarily be the ultimate aim if being an artist is to make any sense at all. To accept one’s destiny and unconditionally take up the greatest of challenges. In the self-understanding of artists next best is always unsatisfactory, and the pursuit of the ultimate expression is endless. Art only gains significance through such endeavour. To content oneself is evidence of a state of stagnation. In other words, routine which is deadly to art.
Karen Blixen says that lion hunting is a rendezvous. Likewise, an artist’s confrontation with every new piece of work is a tempestuous rendezvous with an otherworldly gamut of emotions, ranging from the highest satisfaction to the deepest despair.
In a former suite of works on the theme of Karen Blixen (“Between the Lines” ed.) Vilsbøll used the poet’s weakness for hats as a recognisable symbol in her paintings. Of course not with the intention of depicting the poet’s hat, but in order to paint the sensation of Blixen. To paint, so to speak, the whole life of the poet, her convictions and goals into the painting. This again stresses the painter’s desire to convey, in a non-linguistic artistic idiom, archetypal emotions on a high level. These are all emotions that are difficult to express in words. The delight to the eye and the desire of the heart that we may be too embarrassed to put into words in a prosaic everyday context. A profound, distinct feeling that unexplored possibilities and passions lie hidden within us, capable of being released by the words or pictorial expressions of great artists.”
Breaking Barriers
“Few Danish artists have mastered the artistry and craftsmanship that Anne Vilsbøll so uniquely combines in the art of painting on handmade paper. A number have made the attempt, but few have carried on, because the working process is lengthy and difficult. It can only be achieved through the acquisition of a technical insight, which is gained through years of experiments, and demands extraordinary patience, but in recent years the results achieved by Anne Vilsbøll show great personal strength, so that her imagery is expressed with a sensitivity to colour that goes far beyond the norm for Danish art. She has broken barriers.
To wander briefly through an exhibition of her work is to do it less than justice. One has to dwell on her art, to take careful note of details, the relations between forms, the movement of lines and a depth and glow in the colours – blue within blue, and ochre beyond ochre. These paintings do not insist. Quite opposite, there is a hushed silence, which has its source in the artist’s calm conviction that her dreams are coming through. The struggle, the labour and the energy spent have not been in vain.
Anne Vilsbøll has many talents. She is known in art circles throughout Scandinavia as a pioneer in working with handmade paper. Her world – wide travels to study the making of paper of varying thicknesses, surface structure and transparency – is unparalleled. Through the courses she has held, and the books and articles she has published, many have benefited from the knowledge, she has gained. And even though she has kept a secret or two for herself, she has been open-handed and helpful. In this respect her education and her natural ability to communicate with others have undoubtedly been a great asset.”
Extract from “Breaking Barriers” by H.P. Jensen, Art Critic from the catalogue “Made in Water” 1994.