The sharp blue and green formations of mountains and grass quiver in the yellow and red rays from the setting sun.
It is a magnificent natural experience which is displayed with full force and dramatic splendour of colours in the painting Twilight from 1993. The master behind this work, Arnold Vegghamar, is his own man both stylistically and motivically to such an extent that the viewer in front of one of his works is rarely in doubt as to the author‘s identity. The recognizable style is achieved because the visual artist endows a classic Faroese landscape painting with a distinct perspective, in many cases by going very close to the subject, just as he uses atypical effulgent range of colors.
The painter Arnold Vegghamar was born in 1937 in Viðareiði. He is an autodidactic painter who already the fifties started working as as visual artist, participating in the Ólavsøka Art Exhibition in 1957. He was then a student at the short-lived but important art school run by the modernist pioneers, Ingálvur av Reyni, Jack Kampmann and Janus Kamban in the winter of 1958-59. Vegghamar was apprenticed to a goldsmith and worked in the trade for a number of years, whilst also painting, but for the last several years he has devoted himself entirely to visual arts in the studio at his home in Viðareiði.
In 2010, the Faroe Islands Art Museum held a large separate exhibition displaying Arnold Vegghamar’s older and more recent works. Here we see an encapsulation of Vegghamar’s distinct artistic development towards an increasingly radical simplification and abstraction of landscape motifs, which unmistakably took off at the start of the new millennium. These images appear almost primitive in their intrepid construction and colour choices, with few but strong colours and a powerful, simplified field painting. During his many years in the service of art, Arnold Vegghamar has developed his composition from naturalistic landscape painting and a fierce coloristic expressionism to a relatively simple and unostentatious style, in which he reinterprets the well-known theme of the village by the sea inspired by his own surroundings in and around Viðareiði. He has reiterated and simplified this motif, so that it has become iconic in paintings that adorn the walls of many homes.
As evidenced by a painting like Bygd (Village) from 2007, the motif is expressed in naivistic style with houses devoid of doors, windows or other realistic details. The red, yellow and black cabins are almost arbitrarily placed on the painting’s surface like floating Lego bricks above a green ground representing grass. In addition, we observe ocean, sky and mountains. These bricks form some of Arnold Vegghamar’s basic elements, which he arranges diversely in a seemingly endless series of combinations.Despite the cheerful, luminous colours in Arnold Vegghamar’s paintings, the impression can come across as serious and mystical – the landscape paintings are usually empty of people, revealing only life provided by nature. On the other hand, the candy-coloured rocks in the mountains and by the beach seem vibrantly alive, almost as if they were populated by supernatural beings. This gives Vegghamar’s pictorial world a coherent character, which is further emphasized by the horizontal line and the edge of the mountain that meanders through the visionary landscape portrayals.
Kinna Poulsen,
MA in Art History and Art Critic
