There is a practical problem at the centre of Ingrid Solberg's practice. She paints Norwegian winter landscapes. Norwegian winters do not permit oil painting outdoors. Below about five degrees Celsius, linseed oil begins to set too quickly to be worked; below zero, it ceases to behave like paint at all. Solberg's solution - the solution that has, in retrospect, defined the character of her entire body of work - is to memorise.
Observing and Remembering
She goes outside in winter - often in temperatures of minus ten or below - without a canvas, without materials, without anything except the capacity to observe and, later, to recall. She walks the Vestfjord path above Bergen, she stands on the wharf at Nordnes in January darkness, she drives the coastal road to Sotra at the hour of maximum midwinter light. She looks at things for longer than is comfortable. Then she returns to the studio and begins.
This process introduces a necessary delay between observation and mark-making, and the delay is not neutral. Memory does not preserve scenes; it preserves experiences. What Solberg's studio practice works from is not a record of what a particular fjord looked like on a particular afternoon, but the residue - coloured by feeling, simplified by the unreliability of recall, shaped by what attention selected - of having been present in that landscape at that moment.
The Light
Scandinavian winter light is among the most distinctive in the northern hemisphere. At Bergen's latitude, winter days last between six and eight hours, and the sun's angle is so low that it never fully clears the horizon. The quality of illumination this produces - diffuse, directionless, cold but without the harshness of direct sunlight - is unlike anything available farther south. Photographers come to Norway for exactly this light; Solberg has spent fifteen years learning to paint it.
"The difficulty," she has said, "is that Scandinavian light has no drama. It doesn't arrive from a single direction. It doesn't create strong shadows. It reveals everything equally and flatly - every surface receives exactly as much light as every other surface. This is very hard to make interesting in a painting, and I find it endlessly interesting to try."
The German Romantic Inheritance
Two years spent in Düsseldorf in her late twenties, working alongside painters in the tradition of German Romantic landscape, gave Solberg a technical and historical context for her own practice. Caspar David Friedrich, whose relationship to northern light she considers the closest predecessor to her own concerns, is a point of reference she acknowledges freely. "Friedrich understood that northern landscape is an interior experience as much as an exterior one," she has said. "You are not just looking at something. The landscape is doing something to you, and the painting needs to do the same thing to the viewer."