Trude Viken: ARTIST’S STATEMENT 2021

Oslo, July 2021

Although Trude Viken is showing portraits and figural compositions in medium to large formats, she had her artistic breakthrough with the series “Diary Notes”. It started in 2014, and her idea was to paint a series of small self-portraits in the standard A4-format. Her gaze was soon turned around, and what was intended as self-portraits turned into something else. The paintings became expressive experiments as part of a process where the goal was to develop her own, artistic expression.

Trude Viken has continued to paint her “Diary Notes”. During the years she has painted several hundred portraits in the series. They are not portraying herself or anybody else as they look. The paintings are more like renderings of different moods and fantasies that appears and reappears. To bring all this onto the canvas, she uses oil paint as her media. She says this about her method:

“I twist and knead the oil paint in thick layers. It is processed until the shapes dissolve and the images meet my intentions and requirements. I am a colorist, and I work intuitively. Almost everything is allowed. The layers of oil paint can be very many before I am fully content.”

Out of this process a cluster of figures have appeared. They are staged in various compositions, interpreting the expectations of everyday life. This is what interests her the most. The portraits and her figure compositions have developed into fantasies of how we feel behind our facade. Trude Viken’s paintings expresses those feelings. Her demand is that they must be genuine:

“When I have bad days, I know that most people also have them. Those days, hours or minutes are part of our life. We keep smiling happily and seem untouched to those around us. The urge to hide everyday challenges is so common. In the end we only fool ourselves. The difficulty of showing those tough sides of life makes me curious. This gives me a desire to continue my project.”

One reason for Trude Viken’s interest is to be found in Oscar Wilde’s 1890’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. The story lurks in her mind when she works with the “Diary Notes”. The novel is about Dorian Gray who sells his soul in order to remain young and beautiful. His age and all his sins do not mark his bodily appearance. Instead his painted portrait gradually gets older and uglier. His life is more and more becoming a double life. With today's consumer community and popular culture, this novel is equally – or even more – relevant as when it first was published.

Over time, she has produced two major works out of the “Diary Notes”. The portraits are put together into two independent compositions. They consist of a grid made up of 100 portraits (first presented at Fortnight Institute in New York, 2018), and one with 259 portraits (exhibited at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway, 2021).

“The process of continuously adding new portraits to the “Diary Notes”-series, has made me even more curious. It has aroused a new interest in staging the states and emotions I try to portray into large formats. I want to paint them into and out of the grey of everyday life, in moments that are often considered taboo or difficult to show to others. I paint what I have seen. Not what I see.”

Even though the two media are hugely different, there is a close connection between Trude Viken’s paintings and drawings:

“I like to look at drawing as painting and painting as drawing. To me, the two are intricately connected. They are about the same thing – except that the tools are different. In my experience drawing and painting go hand in hand. My drawings are often also portraits, and I use the pencil in the same way as I use the brush when I paint. I twist and turn it, with its different hardness’s and sizes, until the line and shapes dissolve, until the drawings meet my requirements and intentions. In all my work I play with the contrasts that arise, with abrupt transitions from the bright and delicate to the rough and dark. These works are characterized by a clearly expressive line. I pursue my dreams and desires with passion.”