for eword Lizette Gradén, Ph.D. chief curator Nordic Heritage Museum
take their point of departure in postcard images of smalltown official buildings and pastoral landscapes dotted with red cabins and fluttering Swedish fl ags. Ot hers bo ast oi l paintings of placid lakes or trickling creeks. Still others are mixed media with postcards, painted birch trees and gluedon items. Regardless of their subject matter, they share the feature of being created from birch slabs. Often the picture itself features a birch tree — a cherished symbol of the Nordic countries, including Sápmi, the land of the indigenous people of Northern Europe. Moreover, the images depicted in birch board pictures underline manifestations of apparently mundane daily life and popular culture.
Faint afternoon September sunlight seeps into my second floor office at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. The rays reach the west wall and bring out the luster of turquoise linen weft as shown in the Heaven and Hell wall hanging by Wanja Djanaieff. They sweep over the current exhibition schedule, numerous notes, invitation cards, photos and memos tacked onto the bulletin board. Moving south in the room, the rays bring out the vibrant colors and illuminates Jesus and his disciples as shown in the largest in my board picture collection: The Last Supper based on postcard version of Leonardo DaVinci’s mural. As an addition to a few Swedish birch board pictures featuring windmills and red cabins, Th e Last Supper was a gift from a Seattle friend, with whom I share the interest in garage and estate sales. This piece, mounted on pine wood, may be understood as the American cousin of the birch board picture — similar and different at the same time. In order to create a board picture, a postcard was glued to a thin, diagonally sawed piece of a tree trunk, leaving its bark at the edges. In Sweden the preferred wood was birch. The postcard image was then painted on, and sometimes it included three- dimensional objects.
The miniature landscape is an interesting entrance into the study of creative processes. Epitomizing convenience and control, the miniature as a form enables people to create installations of their own — imaginary spaces — poetic places for reflection. As poet and scholar Susan Stewart points out, the miniature format is especially exciting because it intensifies and reinforces values. The board pictures articulate values and perspectives associated with particular places, and in the case of the birch board pictures, the association is Sweden.
The exhibition Bad Art? 1,000 Birch Board Pictures from Sweden strives to demonstrate how and why many artists maintain a dialogue with specific traditions pertinent to a notion of Swedish folk art, and draw inspira-tion from items often associated with informal expressive culture and personal creativity. For the artists in this particular exhibition, folk art or vernacular art serves as a platform for stories about a sense of place, a sense of time, ritual and everyday life. Their works span an aesthetic spectrum from sparse and discreet, detailed and meticulously made, to over-the-top expressions buoyant with color. Some works
One of the most well-known examples of miniature landscapes in the Nordic region is probably Skansen, the world’s first open air museum, established by Artur Hazelius in 1891. It is arranged so that the visitor is given the illusion of moving through the country of Sweden. The birch board picture does the opposite. Small things are easy to store and they are movable. Its capability to harbor an entire world made the miniscule picture a primary object for traveling salesman roaming the Swedish countryside in the early twentieth century, and later, when traveling became more common, the birch board picture emerges
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