I look for the human and intimate around me. As someone that has no fixed home and very little certainty since I started traveling, I find myself looking for vessels: a house, a person, a room, an intimate human detail.

As a child and an adolescent I grew up to love all that was American: music, literature, movies, history. Itês an image of the fast, the raw, of unlimited space, infinite skies, of the road and basic uprootedness. It became for me a metaphor for the essence of human life and living.

As I try to express this vision, my reality and my longing in my work, I use mostly photos taken while living and working in America. I cut them up, collage and reduce them to find some core image or images. The last stage in this process is that I translate these images into paint. I use abstraction as a way to give them space for interpretation, as art to me comes from imagination and should return the same.

Painting especially with oil colours gives me the challenge of technic and freedom of expression. I love to experiment with a limited amount of materials and colours using the knowledge that I gained from studying painters like Greco and Goya. Recently the size of my work has become relatively small due to the circumstances of my traveling, aside from that I like the movability of the work,in the end it's all in the mind.

-Egge Altena

-altenaegge@hotmail.com