Thursday, January 24, 2008


Mountain Top,
medium: oil on canvas panel
size: 24x30cm
$200
One visual metaphor, which is used a lot, is the mountain. People want to get to the mountaintop and every life coach or guru will happily tell us how to get to the mountaintop if only we’ll send some money their way.

I love the mountain as a metaphor and have used it a lot myself in my struggle to make sense of my life and myself. About 6 years ago I realized that I DO NOT WANT to make it to the top. I have no urge to become the very best, or the richest or the most famous. I would very much like to be considered GOOD as in a good mum, a good teacher and a good artist, though. Halfway up the mountain is where I want to go.

The top is so windy and the last stretch so dangerous and exhausting. To me it is not worth the struggle. Another thing is that the competition and therefore the envy and backstabbing and intrigue are so much fiercer at the top level. No fame or fortune would be worth that for me. I have never dreamed about becoming a princess either, because I have never seen anything to envy in that life.

This makes me the perfect candidate for the daily painter movement. We want to make quality art available for ordinary people with ordinary incomes like ourselves. Being on the very top in the art world would make the prices so high that ordinary persons could not afford it and make a distance to the customers. I paint for people like you and me – people who are half way up the mountain.
But the mountaintops are lovely to view from half way up the mountain even though we might not want to climb them. J

2 comments:

blh said...

This painting is beautiful on its own merits alone, especially because it is one of the artist's blue on blue works and the mountain looks so realistic, as well. However, her comments about life, using climbing the mountain as a metaphor, attracts me to "Mountain Top" even more. I happen to agree with the artist that reaching the top of the mountain, by achieving preeminence in some area, is not worth dedicating the majority of one's life to it. To me working toward being the best in anything important is not worth the amount of life that one must give up even in order to try to achieve the goal. Others disagree with us, of course, which is why people who are the "best" at any endeavor exist. It is merely a matter of choices and while I greatly respect those who want the top and who try so very hard for it, I, like Trine Meyer Vogsland, have no desire to be one of them.

Trine said...

It is all about choices.