Why?

 

Why do anyone paint any paintings in a world washed over every second by photos, movies and entertainments in an accelerated pace?

In a world where everyone has a digital camera that can take beautiful photographs.

 

And why paint gloomy paintings with grief and death.

Well, there are simple explanations.

I have always, from early childhood, loved pictures of all kinds.

I also grew up in an old-fashioned atmosphere. My grandfather was born in 1866 and in his turn of the century apartment and at his summer residence there were hanging paintings of artists from the beginning of the 20th century. 

It was an old-fashioned culture of classical music, literature and art.

In the 50s the Social Democrats brought out art to the whole people by ABF and different types of art clubs

It was an image culture. I belong to this time and to this culture whether I like it or not.

 

After the 60s the culture has changed completely but I have not.. My roots are there far back. A hibernating dinosaur that paints pictures.

 

And the many dead or dying people and the bereaved families of the paintings?

Well, I'm heavily influenced by what happened around 1968 in health care. At that time the intensive care revolution broke out.

And I was on the barricades.

I saw people, before this paradigm shift, dying quickly and quietly before our eyes. It was God's will, it was natural.

And then I saw patients surviving in our ventilators. In vain, because they were eaten up by diseases that we ourselves had created and which had not existed before.

At the same time their families were broken down and our staff was tormented.

I was marked by the ethical and existential questions that sometimes seemed unsolvable. I needed to process and reconcile myself with grief, death, and these problems and I started painting. I wanted to narrate.

Elsa Lena Ryding, who has written the poems in this exhibition, has been in the same situation. And that is why her text is so essential for the understanding of the exhibition.

Beyond the medical and technical problems, there is the human interaction. The meeting of the diseased, the dying, the dead and their families and those who care. 
About this I want to tell.
 

There is another drive for me.

I know by heart the art history from Giotto to the modern artists. It is alive in my head. And I'm hoping that one day in the future I will paint a masterpiece on par with these masters.

It drives me and gives me anxiety.

We'll see if I will get time enough, or death will catch me before.

It is deadly serious.

Hans Huldt    March 9, 2013 www.hanshuldt.se