Born in no man´s land. My name is Rune Furelid. I am from Norway and was born in the deep end of a long, dark and in its own way a beautiful fjord, at a place that hardly any Norwegians have ever heard of either, so ill spare you the details.
Close call, nearly dead. A capitalist. Cynical. Also greedy. How did i get into art. Well i was an educated as a marketer, and as an economist i was building my own realestate portfolio. Having alot of success that came to an abrupt ending when i was on the wrong side of the road and with my motorcycle and ran straight into an oncoming car, which like me came in really high speed on the motorway.
A mess. Completely druged out of this universe. Depressed and alone. After 1 month in coma, 2 years in wheelchair, and 3 extra years of hard training i could again walk on my own to feet. The whole time during this recovery i reconsidered what i had been doing so far in life. Had i died that day what had i really done with my time on this beautiful earth that we strive so hard to destroy?
The accident planted a seed in me. I stopped working with money. Did a 180 degree turn, and after 5 years of filmschool, which made me a screenwriter from the national filmschool in Norway, i by accident stumbled sideways into painting.
The man who founded the filmschool was quitting and nobody raised their hand when the students where asked if someone could paint him as a funny way of showing our appreciation. Having never picked up a brush before i said ”oh well. I quess i can try”. After painting him 5 times i was happy and it actually in some strange way looked like him, at least i felt i had capured something that was him, in my own little way.
But that was not the point. My discovery was not him. My discovery was something that stuck with my for some time, before i acted on it. And that was the discovery of an activity that for me was so great that when painting i totally forgot who i was, where i was, when and what else i had to do and why. When painting i was nobody. I was just gone. I forgot to eat, drink, an before i knew it it was 4 in the morning and i had worked for 10 hours straight. What a drug! A natural drug. I never knew that life could offer such a powerful thing.
A short brake from film. I decided that after the filmschool i would take a short brake just to paint for half a year. Just for fun. And almost immediately after i started posting my work on facebook, yep. I started my career 4 years ago on facebook, and almost immediately people started contacting me and wanted to buy my art. This to me was mindblowing! Someone out there wanted to pay me money for what i was making? What was wrong with people? I was not an artist?! Was i?
Long story short. I was picked up by a gallerist, local media then national media and now after 4 years of painting i have my own gallery in a large city in Norway, called Ålesund where i have long lists of people that want to buy my work, and everything i make is sold usually before the paint is dry.
Am i lucky? Yes. Have i worked hard? Yes. Has it been fun? Yes. If i die tomorrow will i be satisfied? Yes.
The truth. My secret if i may call it that. Something that is real. Something that i can feel when i see it. Never an idea in my head. Never! Always what appears on the canvas. So what is my driving force? A constant journey where accidents blow my mind and keep me alive. I never ever make a painting from an idea in my head. My driving force is to see what occur in front of me. That way i always know that if i see something its there. And then all i have to do is keep it and build the rest of the painting around this. It can be that out of an abstract mess i see an eye, large or small, dont matter, i see it, and if it makes me feel someting, trigger some emotion, its a keeper!
This i think is the number one reason why my work i selling so quickly. People are not that different, really. We all have the ability to see and feel, and even though we interpret things differently, most likely the painting will trigger something in them if it triggers something in me. This is not always the case ofcourse, but more often so, than not. Triggering the audience is for me what my art is all about. Making the audience engage and feel.
Take away the important things and people will add them. Its also a driving force and very central in my work to make the audience active participants. I never explain or tell what i feel and think about my own work. That is not my job. My job is to make something that activate them. I dont want to stand in the way. I never want to come between the audience and my work.
Abstract elements invite. To specific exclude. If i would paint a tree in a way so that it looks exactly like in nature, perfect, almost better than photography, why paint it? Why not just take a photo? For me it drives me to show the audience how i see the tree. My subjective way of seeing it. And the less it looks like a tree, the more the audience will wonder. Is it a tree? Or might it be a person? Has he been rejected? Is he/she feeling this or that. And there you go. There you have my job described on paper to you, from my desktop in Ålesund, Norway.
For more of Rune Furelid Check this link of his Instagram account:- https://www.instagram.com/runefurelid/ or his website http://www.runefurelid.no/
All Images are copyright by: Rune Furelid
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