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ULF LOVEN
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| Ulf Loven was born 1936 into a temporarily wealthy family; his mother a pianist, his father having served as a city council member in Stockholm published two slim editions : Nature and Architecture, and The Park Landscape and It's Care. Being an inveterate flaneur he taught his young son how to observe the city, nature in it's microcosmos and macrocosmos, plus he most conscientiously antedated and filled the young boy's paintings. In 1943 the family moved to the suburb of Djursholm where fellow Djursholmers Tore Hultcrantz , Torsten Renquist and P. O. Ultvet were early influences being a generation older. | ||
| However after rejecting institutionalized training and collecting "affishes dechiree" in his cottage on Nytorget 45 he leaves for Greece in 1959, " in search of another reality ". He paints abstract painting in the Greek islands by the thousands on cardboard, never intended for sale or exhibition, but to create " the portals of my creativity ", eventually starting to use the Greek landscape in a very free way, more as a point of reference, or as a point of departure for a phantasmagorical landscape than than a dutiful rendering of reality. | ||
| He travels to New York where after studies with Vaclav Witlacil and Peter Golfinopoulus, his abstract work, always painterly, exhibits an interest in the semiotic, the touch of his brush to the canvas revealing a sign or ideogram usually with an anecdotal reference to a landscape, especially a Greek one. | ||
| He has worked quietly developing his own style and perception of painting, the last 15 years in Harlem New York with an occasional year off, once in Bali and twice in Greece. He has exhibited in America and Greece during the last 30 years but has mostly sold his work privately. In 1999 he was awarded a grant from Art development committee. | ||