An Artist and a Therapist, Inge’s Art is All About Expression of Joy
“In diversity there is beauty and there is strength”
Inge Thogersen’s concept of art is derived from the diversity of professions she possess as an artist as well as a family therapist.
Inspired from the expressionist style of painting, Inge experiments widely in her studio with different techniques of expressing her emotions onto the canvas. She still feels that true inspiration comes from real life moments that attracts while travelling, interacting, listening to music or enjoying the nature, the extreme expression of joy that hits the aesthetical pleasure at that point, becomes an inspiration to be brought onto the canvas with strokes and layers of colors.
Inge’s art pieces are the impressions of the emotions, felt while interacting and healing her clients and also from her surrounding nature and music. Here is how Inge explains her concept of paintings “I think it is my way of digesting the impressions of my everyday life. As a family therapist, I am fascinated to see how people deal with difficulties in their relationships and later it relaxes me when they handle it beautifully and make their relationships perfect. I feel a real deep emotion looking at all this, it really moves me from within.
But it is not just these emotions but also something more that I translate into my paintings, just like some beautiful music or to watch the lushness of my garden, I feel the urge to translate it into colors and shapes.”
Inge’s commercial success as an artist can be counted with her growing international sales from past six months, “It gives me immense pleasure to know that my paintings are hanging around the world”. She feels that with time art has become easily accessible and people can buy an art piece from an artist anywhere in the world.
Colors in Inge’s paintings are real mood lifters and here we know how “I keep experimenting with different shades - such as earth tones and delicate pastels - but I have to admit that it is the most powerful and strong color and the one that works best for me. As I fall in love with the colors around me, my color palette keeps changing a bit.” Yes that’s true as we can see a lot of gold and white in her recent works.
It has been 20 years now since Inge started to paint. Inge’s process of painting started as a conscious effort to plan out from detailed sketches at that time and today it has evolved into the unconscious effort which can be said as the awaken emotion driven stage. This completely fills her heart with joy while painting and finally relaxes her. Inge believes that the audience should be given full freedom to feel this joy, so in such a situation she feels that is better not to give titles to the paintings, as that might affect every individual’s personal imagination.
When we observe Inge’s art pieces closely, we would notice that her pieces constitute a lot more medium than just acrylics. Inge works in different layers of paint, which helps her create expressions, “I paint with acrylic paint most often on canvas. I sometimes use collage, oil pastels, soft pastels, Most often, the texture is due to the fact that I use thin and thick layers applied with putty.”
Some of artists who have inspired Inge during her artistic journey are “Kvium, I think, is fascinating because he is so crazy, brave and imaginative. I am quite obsessed with Per Kirkeby's paintings and sculptures, Frida Kahlo, especially her self-portraits that can be considered and interpreted endlessly and Alfonso Mucha.”
These days Inge is busy developing her collage works, refining her expressionist style of painting and could soon come up with huge wall sized paintings. Also planning to come up with some interesting concrete sculptures in the future.