Page 17 - recent works

THE SEA GIVES AND THE SEA TAKES

Tradition has it, that fishermen in the Stockholm archipelago did not learn to
swim. This was not so much a question of ignoring their personal safety as an
acceptance of what life taught them: that to become one with the sea was no
worse a threat than to end their days as a landlubber.
I am sometimes reminded of this seemingly uncomplicated philosophy
of life when I look at Ann Frössén’s paintings of raging seas – mighty landscapes
that seem as timelessly existential as they are naturally embedded in the
Romantic idea of nature being unfathomable and sublime. She is one of the few
women painters who dares to enter this very male preserve.
Getting closer to water and the sea involves trying to stop something
that is never still. Ann Frössén often returns to this paradox of catching the
constant movements of the sea at close quarters on canvas. Viewed from
the perspective of art history she is on solid ground with roots that reach
down into a lengthy and wide-ranging northern European romantic
tradition. Artists like Caspar David Friedrich, William Turner and Emil Nolde
worshipped the watery element and raised the immeasurable seas to a
symbol of eternity of almost religious dimensions.
My thoughts also turn to a fellow Swede, the author August Strindberg
whose harrowed and feverish paintings of Stockholm’s archipelago form a link
to the tensions in Ann Frössén’s paintings about a hundred years later.
But the question remains: How can Ann Frössén’s roaring wave-crests
and restlessly breaking seas be translated into words? How can one find a
maritime language with the capacity to cover the nuances and gradations
of her paintings and the experiences of life that she portrays? In one breath I
seem to have captured the words and the concepts but, with the next breath,
I am forced to watch them slip through my fingers, transform themselves and
assume entirely new forms. Perhaps, like Joseph Conrad, one needs to go to sea in
order to be able to approach a monsoon or trade-winds convincingly and with the
necessary precision. No one has equalled this Polish-born, British nomad of the
seas in his ability to describe what it feels like to meet a furious sea in the depths of
Hades all alone.
One thing is incontestable: Ann Frössén’s intimate struggle with the water

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