I øjeblikket kan man se ca. 6 af mine malerier hænge i Galleri Flintholm på Fyn. Flere af mit Computer Art er også hængt op, indrammet, og klar til salg 🙂
På billedet kan man se en gul tiger, der hænger på endevæggen af det meget store og flotte galleri. I “Glasburet” ser man en stor Peter Brandes skulptur.
Our village lies in an area where there are forests of evergreen oaks and box. They don’t grow very tall, 2-3 metres at most. The area is as big as Zealand, in Denmark, with small villages here and there. They are obviously quite isolated. In the area there are many wild boars, foxes, pheasants and birds of prey. Here they live safe and sound. It is easy to hide. There is peace and quiet.
Sometimes there are many hunters in the area. Especially the wild boars attract their interest. The locals say, “If you run over a wild boar, then it’s a problem, not for the boar but for the driver.”
I know this by bitter experience. My car still smells of pig.
One night I was driving through an isolated area to get home. Quietly and peacefully. But suddenly while I was driving I saw in the headlights that there was a flock of wild boar by the side of the road. At the same moment the great flock leader started to cross the road towards the car at an enormous speed. It all happened so fast that it was impossible to brake or avoid the impact. Then the unavoidable happened. I thundered into this belligerent monster. Its head with the small shining eyes and corner teeth are etched into my memory. But luckily I only hit its rear, which flew up over the radiator and down along the side of the car. The boar was so big that its back was higher than our radiator. The whole of the car’s radiator was crumpled up. Everything happened so suddenly as in an image which had passed the retina in a series of impressions without a conscious reference.
I was paralysed by the situation.
While the boar got up and ran into the forest with the rest of the family, I still sat behind the windscreen in my car with a fervent wish that I could paint myself out of this picture.
Art is a form of madness because there are so many risks in connection with artistic observations. The transgressions of normal limits which every artistic process presupposes can be fateful.
The costs are great. Sometimes it is a matter of life or death.
An artist who outlives himself can control his madness. Controlled madness is the true badge of an artist.
Through controlled madness the artist reaches the targets he aspires to.
Madness can be a wild tiger which must not be killed. One must make do with identifying it, hunting it, forcing it up in to a corner and harnessing it to one’s feelings and imagination.
A wild tiger must be tamed.
The tamed tiger will lead the artist much further forward than any school, teacher, drug or religion will be able to.
But as with every source of strength and development, there is a risk in playing with one’s own savagery. Sometimes when the identification and the hunt go too fast, the process disintegrates and the tamed tiger turns on the artist with its atavistic savagery.
An ochre tiger. 114 x 146 cm. 2012. Uffe Christoffersen
The skin of the tiger is mainly yellow ochre with white areas on the belly and head. Then there are the characteristic black tiger stripes lying in great swathes round the body. For several years I have studied the earth colour ochre, as I consider that this colour comes closest to the natural colour of the tiger’s skin.
In the great ochre pits of the south of France one can see a graet range of colour tones, stretching from the pale pink, over greenish, yellow and orange tones, to the deepest red and dark purple – caput mortuum. the word ‘ochre’ is presumed to come from the Greek ‘ochros’ i.e. pallid or pale yellow – a slightly incorrect name because of the ochre colours great strength of colour. The raw material, which is mainly of clay coloured by yellow, red or reddish brown iron [forbindelser], occurs in smaller or larger concentrations all over the world. They can vary considerably in colour – for example from the yellow or yellowish brown of Italian Terra di Sienna, to the red or reddish brown Spanish ochre. The colours can also vary greatly not only between the geographical locations, but within the individual local occurrence.
The strong sunlight which falls on the yellow or reddish yellow banks lights up brilliantly and contrasts vividly with the cerulean blue of the sky. The dark green pine trees that grow in these areas are covered in a fine ochre dust, which is constantly whirled up by the wind, so that it almost blankets the natural colour characteristics of the vegetation. But mainly it is the richness of nuances in the ochre material itself which is important and it is a great inspiration for me in my painting.
The ochre colours can in sunlight nearly compete in intensity with the synthetic yellow, orange and red colours, while in theshade they become subdued yellowish brown colours. In the same way the tiger’s golden brown skin lights up in the sun, while it can converge with the surroundings because of its combination of stripes and subdued tones. Here is indeed a contrast which suits this temperamental beast down to the ground. There is a difference between what you see and experience in nature and what you feel as a painter in front of your easel and have to convert these often contradictory ideas or feelings into pictures. You have to get inside the material itself and in that way find out what you really want to do.
The way I use earth colours is an attempt to use them as one sees and perceives them in nature in different lights. Through systematic research I have throughout the years discovered a way to compensate for the weaknesses that occur when the paint comes into the studio, in the form of a tube, from where it can be squeezed out as a brown substance on to one’s palette. At the Academy of Art in Copenhagen it was forbidden to mix the cheap earth colours with the very expensive cadmium paints. We were supposed to either paint with earth colours or the spectral colours, and not mix the two systems together.
The three well-defined earth colours I use are yellow ochre, raw Sienna and red ochre. To increase the intensity of the ochre colours they have to mixed with a related pure colour. A yellow ochre has to be mixed with a warm yellow cadmium colour, a raw Sienna has to be mixed with cadmium orange, and the red ochre with a light cadmium red. White is added in the amount you desire depending on how light the colour is to be. On the other hand a mixture of a colour with a different colour value and an ochre colour will not be suitable in this connection. Instead of increasing the ochre colour’s intensity it would transmute it into a different colour completely.
If you try to mix lemon yellow to yellow ochre, the green of the lemon yellow will dissipate the warm yellow in the ochre colour, in the same way as mixing a warm yellow cadmium colour with a red ochre will turn it into a more orange tone, and therefore change it in a different direction than was desired.
Besides this it is absolutely necessary to use the purest pigments mixed with a suitable [bindemiddel] to achieve the desired results. With these colours which stretch from being subdued and passive, on a sliding scale to being highly active, it is actually possible to paint a tiger in its different temperaments. Every stage which a wild animal can be in. Tigers fighting, playing, copulating, hunting and consuming their prey, etc. At the same time it affects oneself, so that the inner powers that control the painter’s instincts are released. They are powers of nature akin to those that control the instincts of the animal of prey.
Several years ago a French psychiatrist visited my studio. He mentioned that my tiger paintings did not actually depict animals but people.
Uffe Christoffersen
TRIVIA
Three Ways – Three Colours
by Uffe Christoffersen
Many-headed beasts occur in many places in mythology. Each head symbolises one way in which this beast can behave, a special power it has, for example a god with three heads can have three kinds of power. An example of this is found in Græco-Roman goddess Trivia, who has three heads. Trivia is the goddess of ghosts and magic. She is especially worshipped at crossroads, where she shows herself on moonless nights accompanied by mares, dogs and she-wolves. Her name, Trivia, means ‘three roads’ in Latin. She therefore symbolises a choice between three possibilities, or worlds as the Greeks saw it: Hades, the human world and Olympus. She also has three sides to her personality: a good side, where she among other things gives birth to women, protection on one’s travels, riches, victory and consolation, – and an evil side, awful and infernal, where she rules over spectres, nightly visitations and terrible demons. She is the witch who symbolises the unconscious, where savage beasts and monsters roam.
YELLOW
Whether it be intense, powerful, so sharp that is screams out, or wide and dazzling as molten metal, yellow is the most informative and most burning colour. It is difficult to extinguish and breaks all the bonds one tries to tie it down with.
The sun’s rays break through the azure of heaven and show the power of the divine sphere above: Amongst the Aztecs’ gods, Huitzilopochtli, who is the victorious warrior and the god of the midday sun, is always painted yellow and blue in the pictures.
Yellow is the masculine colour, which brings light and life into the yellow/blue duo, and cannot be made dark. It has such a tendency to remain light, that no dark yellow exists. Yellow is therefore closely related to white. It brings youth, strength and youthful eternity.
Golden yellow is often a means of communication between humans and the gods: In India they used a golden knife in the great horse sacrifices. In the Mexican cosmology the golden yellow colour is the colour of the ‘earth’s new skin’ at the start of the rainy season. It symbolises therefore the mysteries of renewal. For this reason Xipe Totek, also called the ‘skinless’ or ‘skinned’ ruler, who is the god of spring rain, is also the god of the goldsmiths. At the spring festival his priests bore skins of the executed human sacrifices, which they painted yellow to enlist the help of this terrible deity.
BLUE
Blue is the deepest of all colours. It lets one’s gaze penetrate without hindrance and lose itself in eternity. It is as if it is constantly fleeing.
Blue is the most incorporeal of all colours: In nature it often occurs as transparency, like a concentration of a vacuum which for example could be air, water, crystal or diamond, which have no colour in themselves. A vacuum is precise, pure and cold.
Blue is the coldest of all colours and when it occurs alone, the purest, apart from a total vacuum, which occurs in neutral white.
Djengis Khan, who founded the great Mongolian dynasty, was the son of a wild deer and the blue wolf. The Turkish and Mongolian literature is full of blue lions and tigers…
The idea that nobility should have blue blood in their veins comes from the fact that it was a mortal sin to swear in the middle ages. The common people avoided swearing as a result, but the nobility took no notice of the prohibition. But one day a Jesuit enlisted the king’s help and forced them to cut out the name of God from their oaths. Therefore they replaced the word ‘dieu’ (or God) with the word ‘bleu’ (or blue). In this way ‘par la mort de Dieu’ (by the death of God) became ‘Morbleu’, ‘Sacré Dieu’ (Holy God) became ‘Sacrebleu’ and ‘par le sang de Dieu’ (By the blood of God) blev ‘Palsangbleu’. Even though the servants heard this latter oath, they only noticed the ‘sang bleu’ part (Blue Blood), and as they didn’t swear themselves, to separate the nobility from the common people they called them ‘sang bleu’ or ‘blue blood’!
RED
Red is universally acknowledged as a symbol of life because of its power, its strength and its glow. But red, which is the colour of fire and blood, has the ambiguity of both of these, depending on whether it is light or dark.
The clear, light red colour, which is rich and extrovert, belongs to the day, is masculine, fresh and incites to action by covering everything with its glow like an enormous invincible sun. The dark, heavy red is on the other hand nocturnal, feminine, secretive and almost introvert. It is not a symbol of expression, but of the mystery of life. The former pulls one along with it, it is the colour used for flags, advertisements etc, the latter holds one back: it is the colour of ‘prohibition’, it is used for the red light bulb which prohibits entry to a film or radio studio. It is also the colour of the lamp outside bordellos. Its role was to draw people inside, which may seem a contradiction, but it was the most prohibited thing at the time.
Tiger 10. -50 x 50 cm. 2007.
…
At the moment I am working on a tiger’s head. It snarls and spits at one. With its jaws open. It is making a signal.
It has its eyes closed.
But there is also a smile, even though it is ambiguous.
An ambiguity reflects the tiger’s character.
Once I was visited in my studio by one of my friends, a French psychiatrist. No just any psychiatrist. He is among other things a great admirer of Jean Dubuffet’s art. He looked at my animal pictures amicably. After a while he looked at me and said, “Uffe, you don’t paint animals at all. Has nobody ever told you that you have been painting human beings?”
Maybe he is right in that I search to find the balance between the presence and the absence of various characteristics.
…
Uffe Christoffersen
“THE SEVEN TIGERS”
In the period: 29th September – 13. October 2007
Galerie Birch
Bredgade 6,
DK- 1260 Copenhagen
Denmark
Tuesday-Friday:
11:00-17:00
Saturday:
11:00-15:00
Catalog:
Download PDF. 744 KB
uffe-christoffersen-the-seven-tigers-2007.pdf
….
…
I live in a village which functions for part of the year as a collection point for sheep. More than ten thousand sheep arrive at the place in great lorries. The lorries have several storeys so there can be quite a lot of sheep in them. The columns of lorries always arrive in the autumn after the sheep have been up in the mountains to graze. After arriving they are divided up into smaller flocks which go round the countryside, driven by a shepherd and 4-5 dogs, which are unbelievably good at defending their flock against attack from strange dogs, foxes and thieves. The dogs keep the flocks together, too.
Sheep are exposed to many dangers, animals of prey are not limited to one place. They are everywhere, disguised or not so disguised. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. You can recognise them by their instincts. by their ruthlessness. Here and now. By their mode of attack.
My own dog once ran off to chase sheep. It came home covered in blood to be met with a face expressing surprise and worry. I thought I knew the dog. But nature has its own cycle. Even though a dog can be calm and disciplined, a role model for other dogs, it has its aspects, just as other species have theirs. Its behaviour can seem unpredictable and intangible. My eyes seek out this focus when the schism between nature and culture has to stand its test.
One Man Show:
Uffe Christoffersen
“THE SEVEN TIGERS”
In the period: 29th September – 13. October 2007
Galerie Birch
Bredgade 6,
DK- 1260 Copenhagen
Denmark
Tuesday-Friday:
11:00-17:00
Saturday:
11:00-15:00
Catalog:
Download PDF. 744 KB
uffe-christoffersen-the-seven-tigers-2007.pdf
….
Have just been out to pick mushrooms, which are to be enjoyed with a good glass of claret. They will be roasted with garlic. Hunting for mushrooms is like painting, a process. It takes place in the back of the mind, where all one’s senses are co-ordinated. You should be able to dissect a mushroom in the same way that one dissects a picture, seek into its flesh. Eating mushrooms is like painting a picture. There is something raw and bitter about it. It has something to do with the smell, the experience. You are close to nature, a part of it. You recognise each other by one’s mutual respect. Know where the dangers lurk. Just as with the tiger picture, which glares at a wrong brush stroke with terrible eyes. It warns you, even though it has only reached my inner sight.
Otherwise it is better to stick with the walnuts and chestnuts.
There are enough of them.
But they are not as interesting as the mushrooms and need no previous knowledge.
La Bête du Gevaudan –
or the Animal that swallowed the Whole World
The wolf has always been a symbol. Here in Europe it has amongst other things been a symbol of fertility. Who doesn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf? When you analyse this story closer, it turns out that the story is about the little girl changing into a woman, helped on her way by the wolf. I don’t only mean the version by Perrault from the end of the 17th century, which is the best known, but also the old legends from before that time. The oral traditions. These are often more grim than the story we already know, and describes in great detail how the wolf butchers the grandmother like a pig and how Little Red Riding Hood makes a stew of her blood.
About 30 kilometres from where I live the mountainous area of the Cevennes starts, and in these mountains there is a wolf enclosure, where the animals live in semi-freedom in 5 hectares of land. But there is an adjoining area of about 250 hectares which is quite isolated and wild countryside.
One Halloween I visited this enclosure. It took me nearly four hours to drive up there because of the narrow and windy roads. The wolves’ enclosure adjoins a valley called le Val d’Enfer. The Vale of Hell. The valley is quite unique with big sharp cliffs, gnarled old trees, foggy atmosphere and a 3 metre wide road which winds up and up over an abyss several hundred metres deep.
The mood is pure Edgar Allen Poe.
Thus one enters the wolves’ enclosure.
The following story is told about this very area:
At the beginning of 1764 some young cattle farmers reported that a large dog had attacked them several times, but their cows and oxen had protected them.
This would not have amounted to much, if the remains of a 14 year old girl, who had been devoured, had not turned up.
This was the start of a story which lasted 3 years.
By December 1764 there were 18 dead.
A hunt was organised.
In January 1765 the king, the bishop and the département promise a reward of 800 pounds to be rid of the nuisance.
January: 11 victims.
February: 6 victims.
A huntsman was sent to the area by the king. The huntsman had previously killed 1200 wolves. He is an experienced man. No result.
Death has a field day.
Another huntsman was sent out. He finds that the tracks around the victims’ bodies are inexplicable.The rumours run wild. Is it hyenas? An animal from a fable? A mixture of a wolf and a bear? A monster escaped from a circus? A divine punishment, an instrument of the devil? A sadist or a werewolf?
The proof?
All kinds of traps had failed. The bishop asks the people to pray.
The hunt starts with hounds trained in hunting wolves. A large pack of wolves is wiped out. The attacks stop. But it has meant 57 victims in 9 months, mostly quite young people.
But a couple of months later two more children were killed in the same area, and the killings continue.
A new huntsman arrives with his rifle, blessed by the church. He has lead bullets made out of Virgin Mary’s medallions. A large animal like a wolf is shot. A very strange wolf.
And the killings stop.
In 3 years 99 people were killed.
Already when the first victims were discovered, the rumours began to fly.
It is easy to understand that there are different opinions today about whether it is a good or bad thing for wolves to be reintroduced into France in the wild. It is known that there is a wild pack living near the Italian border. They are protected, but many people especially cattle and sheep farmers think they ought to be eradicated.
As I keep a dog myself, I know all about a dog’s instincts. But when one approaches wolves, you soon discover the difference. The wolf’s behaviour is three times as obvious as the dog’s. The wolf pack has a stricter ranking order. Only the leaders may procreate. Only the strongest survive. The yellow eyes of the wolf look right through you. You feel an atavistic power and understand how rumours about wolves come about. You feel the attraction of the savage beast and feel a connection with one’s forefathers.
I start to understand why, 30 kilometres from where I live, there were people who painted wolves, tigers, bears and bison with earth colours in large chalk caves, – cave paintings painted about 15,000 years ago.
It was a necessity to survive.
Their powers had to be exorcised.
The strong had to survive.
You had to survive yourself.
The Hare and the Tiger. 73 x 92 cms. 2007
A hare was being chased by a hunter.
It hid in a cave.
Unfortunately a tiger lived there.
………………………….
NIVAAGAARD’S ART GALLERY
2007
The Glow of the Tiger. New works
17th May – 7th October 2007
To see the works at the exhibition divided into 9 different colour groups,
click >>HERE
……………
UFFE CHRISTOFFERSEN 
You must be logged in to post a comment.