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Things happen in mysterious ways. Not so many years ago, an artist acquired notoriety through a slow and laborious pathway made of exhibitions, galleries and collectors to end up hopefully in the biennial and public recognition. Nowadays, social media has become a gigantic gallery where many artists make their work accesible to the rest of the world. That’s how I got to know the work of Benjamin Björklund.
Born in Sweden, Benjamin Bjorklund is an atypical painter in many aspects. His academic training, except for a brief period of time in a design school, is totally self-taught. The credit is all the greater if one considers that the official Swedish art schools have de facto abandoned the teaching of classical painting in favor of conceptual or postmodern art in all its variants. In such an unpromising environment, Benjamin Björklund put all his energy towards his immense determination to paint and paint restlessly; those were years of learning, of many rejected works and no self-indulgence. It wasn’t until Benjamin considered he was producing some worthy results that he started sharing his art with the world.
The natural modesty and sincerity of Benjamin Bjorklund makes him speak of this circumstance as if his painting were the result of continuous effort; but let’s not fool ourselves, hard work and practice are undoubtedly requirements for efficient control of the craft, but they are not in themselves a guarantee of pictorial genius.
Indeed, his effort has revealed a unique way of painting that produces a kind of magic that sublimates any subject matter he addresses. As Vincent Desiderio explains in his theory of technical narrative, good painting is contained and expressed within its own scope. Each brush stroke, each color and each arrangement of a shape within the painting conveys to us the real painting language.
Benjamin Björklund’s own life is also atypical; he lives alone in a country house in the city of Uppsala north of Stockholm surrounded by nature with his Great Dane Ruben (an always ready model) and the rest of his pets. At different times in his life, he has worked in a biology laboratory, and as a prison and psychiatrist guard.
He is a shy man but always kind and willing to humor. Protective of his privacy, he has nevertheless become a social media celebrity. And all this has been done surprisingly without marketing tactics or active search for notoriety; simply showing his work to the world.
You will not find in a CV on his website. His approach to painting is born out of a personal and sensitive response to the world that surrounds him. This goes beyond his own dialectical interpretation. That’s why he does not have an “Artist Statement” and I dare say he does not need it at all. In his own words:
“Unfortunately, I don’t have a well-written artist’s statement, and my own ability with words is very limited. I realize now how fortunate I’ve been to be able to paint in solitude, with little input from the outside, not really been associated with a school or a group of painters. I have been free to create what I want, working normal jobs and painting alone. I struggle to express myself with words, which is probably why painting feels so important. Painting is for me the natural way to react to the things happening around me, making their way into the paintings”.
Benjamin Björklund painting technique
Benjamin Bjorklund is one of the few painters who masterfully uses two media so opposed in technique and materials: oil and watercolor.
Subject matter
Benjamin Bjorklund reflects the world around him. He paints single objects and individual beings. A single object of attention from which he tries to extract the stillness essence.
He has painted many dead animals, as a result of his experience in the biology laboratory. He has painted his pets countless times and makes portraits that are not representations of specific people but abstractions of human beings in which he consciously omits some details to create a universal transcendence.
Color palette
Benjamin Bjorklund used to display a wide range of colors on his palette, although, as he himself confesses, many ended up being unused. It gave him security to have them there so neatly arranged and available. The selection of colors is very similar in both oil and watercolor.
Transparent Oxide Red, Turquoise Blue, Payne’s Gray and “Potters Pink” in watercolor used to be among his favourites. Without giving away other colors, when required by the work at hand, lately he has simplified his palette to leave it with the following colors:
Palette:
Titanium white
Ultramarine blue
Phtalo green
Gold ochre
Cad red light
Burnt sienna
Quinacridrone red
Raw umber
Cobalt blue
Brushes
For oil painting, he usually uses large and medium size flat synthetic brushes. To a lesser extent, he uses round synthetic brushes and Filbert brushes and bristle brushes the latter only to work the contours and move paint.
In watercolor, he uses medium and large round synthetic “squirrel” brushes and also synthetic flats.
Technique
Benjamin Bjorklund’s technique is the result of his own research and is far from conventional. It is not a classic “alla prima” technique with impasto application of paint nor does it use alkyds or driers to work in layers. On the contrary, he works with thin planes of paint and he usually adds a minimum part of clove oil to a conventional mixture of medium made of equal parts of turpentine and linseed oil. The clove oil delays the drying of the paint and keeps it in a state that allows him to influence the work and create overlays and blending.
The way Benjamin Björklund applies the painting is prodigious; he meditates each stroke as if it were the last one he was going to apply. They all make sense. If you want to see Benjamin Bjorklund at work here is a link to the demo he made during his last workshop in Madrid.
Benjamin Björklund did not have an academic training to learn to paint. His artistic expression, his style, is the fruit of intrepid personal introspection. He has not had painting travel companions or artistic groups in relation to which he can be framed. He is a unique artist who from the solitude of Uppsala give us pieces of pure beauty as a gift.
