At the Mirror

Ludvig Karsten is often hailed as one of Norway’s foremost colourist painters. In his pictures, it is colours alone that define both the spatial volumes and the lighting. Karsten contended that it was not the use of multitudinous colours that characterized a good colourist painter: rather, it was a matter of using few colours, the so-called “triple-harmony combinations”, where two main colours – often red and green – were modulated against a third colour. The artist could then employ the entire scale until the colours started to “sing”. Karsten also insisted that art was “a matter of nerve” and that it was the artist’s preliminary touch that was the very essence of art. An artist should create pictures by way of “shivering”, he felt, adding that “I cannot create better pictures by standing around and retouching them”. He was following in Munch’s footsteps here, and Karsten’s pictures often have the air of being battlefields of hasty brushstrokes and turpentine-dripping colour. He wanted to retain his immediate impression of the image, such as it had stuck in his mind’s eye and taken hold of his being, before too much reflection ruined it all.