"Artists often go to great lengths to find the perfect pigment: Yves Klein created his own luminous shade of blue, Delacroix whisked up a “peinture mayonnaise” of egg and linseed oil. But Ørnulf Opdahl digs into the landscape of western Norway, the terrain that he so enigmatically captures on canvas: he is known to create a granular palette out of sand from the beach next to his studio." - Christian House
The paintings of Ørnulf Opdahl (born 1944, Ålesund, Norway) explore the vast and majestic landscapes of the west coast of Norway, where the artist lives and works. Moving between observation and abstraction, Opdahl employs strong elements of colour and shape to build up compositions that highlight the scale of his environment. Dark masses of towering mountains, often draped in fog or snow, are offset by pinpricks of manmade light shining in the black; signs of humanity's small existence amongst these epic proportions of nature. The sheer cliff faces of the deep fjords, impenetrable but for a few solitary rays of sunlight, merge with the darkening skies. The interplay between dark and light against such backdrops suggests a sense of both the ancient and the eternal.
Opdahl's paintings, watercolours, and prints relate poetic encounters between sea and land, storm and stillness, fjords and steep mountains, and dense clouds descending towards land from the ocean. Though his works portray the dramatic landscape of the Western Fjords, they are less concerned with a specific place than the essence of the natural world around him.
