Camilla Nysted.
Artist of the Month, Norway
Spaces between beauty and pain — paintings by Elisabeth Werp Renowned Norwegian artist Elisabeth Bjørnsen Werp has developed a unique style where technique and symbolism glide into each other, creating dream-like and figurative paintings. This summer, she is proud to be exhibiting her work alongside Odd Nerdrum, one of Norway’s foremost painters, at Galleri Jennestad in Vesterålen. “He challenges and inspires my mindset and my willingness to paint better and stronger,” Werp explains.
life. “I understood very early in life that people cannot be trusted. That love is fleeting. That we are on borrowed time – that everything we long for is only on loan, and that the one thing no one can take away from us is the reality and the world we create in our inner self.”
By Ingrid Opstad | Photos: Camilla Nysted
Growing up, Elisabeth Bjørnsen Werp never thought about becoming a painter. Living on a farm with heavy, solid work, she learnt early on that art was something for dreamers and dilettantes. “Still, I was sitting in my room drawing or painting whenever there was no homework and no assignments delegated by my father. Later on, my passion developed into making images with straw, sand, foliage and leftovers of fabric I found, and eventually I ended up with a large twig cabin in the forest, where I made a huge map,” Werp 114 | Issue 126 | July 2019
recalls. The map would contain various mental spaces, so she gathered symbols, sketches, words, poems, postcards and rarities, which all got their own place on the map. “Creating things became my way of coping with the feeling of not belonging, of being a stranger. Creating chaos and emptiness in form and meaning became a craze, and it still is today.”
She believes that the process of painting pictures, creating rooms, building a garden, setting up an altar, making sketches, writing words, understanding a new line of thought, and eventually building your own universe where you experience belonging and permanence, has become absolutely necessary in the world we live in, in order not to sink into self-centering, pondering, narcissism, melancholy and sadness.
‘Painting is my whole life’
To touch something in the observer
To go deeper into her existence and work, Werp explains that painting is her whole
With her art, Werp wants to get closer to the feelings her mind carries, which con-