People ask me sometimes if I paint still life.
I understand why they ask. There are cups in my paintings. Quiet objects. Rounded. Resting.
But no.
A still life is an arrangement. Intentional. Composed. What I paint arrives before I decide anything.
The cups come first. Always from the round.
A curve that wants to continue.
A form that doesn’t know yet what it will become.
Sometimes it stays a cup.
Sometimes it becomes a breast. Sometimes a hip. A rose. A shoulder.
The same gesture, different skin.
I have never painted a cup because it was beautiful to look at.
I paint them because of what they hold. Because of what it means to hold something. To be held.
There is a particular intimacy in a cup — the way it asks to be cupped in both hands.
The way it passes between people without words. The steam that rises when no one is watching.
The cups in my paintings are never alone.
Even when there is no one in the frame, you can feel that someone was just there. Or is about to arrive.
That is what I am after. Not the object. The feeling just before and just after. The warmth that lingers.
The trust it takes to drink from something someone else made.
Hudlöst.
Skinless.
That word in Swedish that has no good translation. Raw in the softest way.
That is what the cups are.
That is what I am painting every time I think I am painting something else.
