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Matilda Forsberg is a portraiture artist with an affinity for stark colors, a painterly hand, and landscape-like compositions.
This series of Forsberg’s works, composed between late 2021-2022, features sweeping meadows of colors juxtaposed with squiggly illustrations of loosely rendered landscape portraits that are symbolic figures of a landscape.
In “A Procession,” a family portrait is composed of vivid tones of yellow, and it is in this vast void that is to be the members’ bodies that Forsberg displays her broad sweeping brush strokes.
Yellow symbolically communicates the joyous occasion of the gathering. Look closely at the littlest child, and you’ll observe a faint party hat worn and a smiley-face balloon floating on their left side.
As your eyes sway, along a pathed meadowland, swaying in the breeze on a summer’s day—the flower buds bump alongside one another; the hypnotizing reflection of the bright sunlight.
In “A Roadmap,” Forsberg likens a family portrait to a landscape by intersecting the composition with an inclining stroke of a black road. A misty mountain range with ghostly monuments of people runs beside the serpentine road.
The juxtaposed images of the mountain range and portrait evoke an illusionary oscillation of the scenes appearing in succession and convey a journey or longing to be home.
In “Currents,” Forsberg composed the composition in three scenes. In the foreground is a lone child immersed in a ruby red field. The middle ground is composed of directional strokes of layered colors and plant-like shapes that slowly appear as a miraged image of figures on opposite trails. While on the upper right corner is a recurring checkered tile pattern seen throughout her works.
Forsberg steers away from a portraiture style to more abstract in rendering the composition, which indicates the sequence of different images flashing within a subconscious mind: within this spellbound is a familiar checkered pattern tiles décor of a home.
Forsberg’s paintings are not simply an image; they are a sensation. The viewer’s gaze activates as they piece together the story of a mountainous region full of fields of Meadowlands and the people that make it a home. It is a longing to be where one’s heart resides.