short story of my life and work

Ragnar is the name given to me at birth

It is an ancient Norse name abbreviated from an even older form; “Regina-herjar” meaning “the king of the marauders or pillaging warriors” in the very violent times at the fall of the West-Roman Empire some 1600 years ago when the Huns pushed the ancestors of the Vikings into Western Europe an up to the coasts of Scandinavia (a well-known saga from that time is called RAGNAR Lodbrok, recently dramatized in a Netflix series. Recommend)

I grew up on a small mountain farm with 9 goats, 5 cows, and a horse. No electricity, 9 months of snow, and 3 months of bright summer nights a few hundred kilometres south of the arctic circle. Like all children I was fond of drawing and continuing into my early teens I started painting with oil. Traditional folk-ornaments in the rococo style at first, Then copying Norwegian golden age masters from the 19th century When I was 19 years old I went to art and craft school at Voss in Western Norway.

Meanwhile, my mother, to whom I was very much attached, had sadly died (I was only 17 and cried constantly for 3 days)Her greatest wish was for me to become a Christian missionary so at the age of 20 I went to a missionary school in Scotland and ended up 3 years later as a missionary to China for this American evangelical youth mission then called “The Children of God" Very fundamentalist and strictly living in communes. After a year in China, I was ousted by the leadership, accused of something I had not done, excommunicated, and thrown out on the streets with no means of survival

Luckily, one of the Chinese “disciples” asked about me, and was lied to (told her that I was sent on assignment to Macau). She didn't believe the leadership, and went looking for me in the city of 4 million (Hong Kong in the mid-seventies) After 5 days she found me (eating out of trash-cans)... Saved my life Back in Europe (we married) I was struggling with religious thoughts of condemnation and wanting to end my life. Luckily I was introduced to cannabis, mescaline, and LSD and landed in a relaxed and more colourful world devoid of angst ....

I also embarked on years of studying the history of religion, anthropology, biology, and physics to clear my head of all the fog of fundamentalism and get a clearer picture of reality. One day I stumbled upon a paperback on the life of Vincent Van GoghI discovered he had a similar life story to mine; was thrown out of the mission he had dedicated his life to. He started drawing and painting; expressing his religious feelings through admiration of nature That became my quest too, and I participated in group an exhibition i Copenhagen (galleri Mitzi) in December 1985 as my debut.

Since then, I have been searching for the unseen structures of nature by continued research in science. The well-known artist Dali did something similar in the last 3 decades of his life (few artists use science as inspiration) As a visual artist, I am mostly autodidact in the fields of painting, sculpture, and art-installation I went to the Aschoug-Jensen school of classical drawing at the Ny-Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (until 1964 that school was compulsory before enrolling at the Royal Danish Academy of Art) and I later did croquies (live model figure drawing) at the Royal Academy (Peder Skramsgade).

In the last half of the nineties and turn of the century, I worked in two large group-studios. In these years I frequently exhibited, mostly solo-shows in and around Copenhagen. In 1996, I was commissioned by the Danish branch of the International Red Cross to make a sculpture for a sculpture-park with an Emigration-theme. The occasion was Copenhagen being selected as the European City of Culture that year. I made the sculpture Homage to Gutorm Gjessing four meters tall. A Venetian looking gondola as a broken boat with two winding “organic” structures (representing generations of humans evolving through time) with a bridge representing part of a generation in one culture emigrating to another location and becoming “mummified” (therefore wrapped in gaze underneath the marble dust). Gutorm Gjessing was a famous Norwegian anthropologist who discovered a psychological “law of nature” stating that when a group of people migrate they “encapsulate” their culture for many generations. (Useful in the study of language-origins, and also in understanding nations socio-politically)...

The Danish painter and leader of the Cobra-movement in the 1950s, Asger Jorn, liked his theories and wrote books about them. In the summer of -96 the Emigration-themed sculpture-park was unveiled by the Danish minister of culture Birthe Weiss| made a second version in wood (mostly elm from trees having to be cut down because of the dreaded elm-sickness that spread up from Holland. We bought 20 tons of large trunks that had stood in a royal castle garden for 200 years) and exhibited it in the garden of “The Norwegian House” where | also made a monumental art-installation of the entire 5 stories house (listed) covered in wood scaffolding (had a fight with the scaffolding union over that one and got police protection) Christo-style and titled “The Norwegian House Politically” after the then prime minister's (who later became head of the COUNCIL OF EUROPE when replaced by Jens Stoltenberg as prime minister)…. political program with the same name. My drift was that Norway had become a way to conservative in outlook (needed the windows and doors restored ON THE NORWEGIAN HOUSE, a restoration job for which I was paid £100 000 over 3 years) and blind to the needs of a changing world and the millions of migrants that would follow ....

In 2004 I took up an art-teaching post at a Christian college in Southern Norway and held it for 2 years until I got fired for “subverting” the 19-year-olds by playing Johnny Cash's "Personal Jesus” Marilyn Manson-style on powerful loudspeakers in the school-yard .... Oh no, not again ...

By now I had a family (lovely wife and 3 children) and we had to move again (the school crashed the year after, by the way. Served them right.) I took a break from exhibiting dedicating my time to my little family and did not exhibit again until 2008 (in a church) with an art- installation including my first “Ancestral Mandal” paintings and a one-meter tall LEGO: brick sculpture; Pain” (the only nerve-proportioned LEGO-crucifix ever made as far as I know). Later the pastor of the church, coming back from the mission field in Ethiopiq, deemed the sculpture to be blasphemous, and the exhibition, named “The Fourth Commandment” was thrown out. (I never seem to learn .....) In 2014 a fire destroyed my rented house where I had my studio, a small gallery, and a large site-specific outdoor art-installation (The LOM-project). Luckily, I was well insured. That summer I stayed in England where my wife and 2 daughters had moved, to study. I got the phone-call from my landlord back in Norway that the house was ablaze. The greatest grief was the loss of thousands of drawings and paper photos, never mind the destruction of 80 paintings and sculptures. In 2015, I built an outdoor studio in England and kept it until 2021 when we had to move again to a new house and studio where I am living now, as well as maintaining a new studio in a different location in Norway and there building a second version of my monumental site- specific outdoor art-installation the LOM- project. The pandemic has kept me from traveling there since 2019, so the project is currently unfinished