Today we’d like to introduce you to Rose Wiklund.
Rose, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
My parents, Andrew and Judith Wiklund, are painters. My mother is a portrait artist, like I am predominantly, and my father is an abstract painter who bases most of his work off of intuition and color. Above our sofa in the living room of our apartment when I was a child, I remember my father had hung his greatest masterpiece, titled “More than a Side of Beef”. I also remember one of my mother’s portraits of my father which was kept in a stack in storage, from when he had long, wavy hair and the most intense eyebrows imaginable.
My parents gave me and my sisters magnetic drawing toys called Magnadoodles when we were little, and that was how I learned to draw. I think I was addicted, because I would spend hours scribbling on the Magnadoodle, only stopping when I refused to erase one of my drawings that I considered a “masterpiece”.
I was a shy kid, so drawing was my outlet. It was always a hobby, until my family moved to Upton in my sophomore year of high school.
When my family moved, I wanted to improve my social skills and entrepreneurship, so I decided to start a portrait booth at the flea market. I had been drawing portraits as long as I could remember, but only of my family and friends. I had never drawn portraits of strangers, and I had never asked for money for them. When I set up my booth for the first few weeks there, people were confused about what my business was. There had been very few artists at the flea market before. But the three years I worked there turned out to be the most valuable experience of my life. There, I learned to talk to so many people from different walks of life. Every weekend, as I drew faces, I would hear stories, stories of grief and betrayal, immigration, families, disease, recovery, hope, and pain. Many stories I still remember. I enjoyed listening to these people, and as I listened, I honed my craft of drawing, trying to capture the person I was observing. Since then, I have always preferred the intimate connection formed with the subject when drawing and painting from life.
After high school, I attended MassArt. There, I learned new techniques. One of my favorite professors at MassArt was Wojciech Wolynski. He told me to stop drawing in black and white because color was magic and brought life to art. Color became the elusive and mystical challenge of my existence. How could I capture the beauty I saw or imagined? Christopher Chippendale was another huge influence on my development. He encouraged my fellow students and I to paint on location, outside. The lack of consistency and control over lighting conditions and weather when painting outside infuriated me, but Chippendale said one thing I will always remember, that he liked my paintings best when they were a little beyond my control. I want to apply this statement to my life as well as my art. I am always trying to learn to react to the spontaneity and unpredictable nature of life.
Now, I am just over a year back from an eye-opening four-month trip to India, I am working as an in-house artist at the House of Blues, and I am dating one of the most talented painters I’ve ever met, Jasper Farish. I am continuing to paint and draw and find my direction. I think it will always have something to do with stories, people, and the fight between repetition, pattern, and transformation.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My art is indirectly tied to my personal experiences, but I’ve learned from many teachers, the best teacher being art itself, that the more love and feeling I put into my art, the more universal it becomes. I am a representational artist, and my greatest loves in art are narrative, contrast, drama, and the life that beats through all objects. Recently, I have been focusing on anatomical symbolism and how an extended connection to an object gives it a personality, life, and heartbeat of its own. This year, I made a series of paintings and prints based on a dried fish with angry teeth. I found it at a market in Allston. The more I explored my psychology through the painting of the fish, the more deeply I understood what it meant to me and why I was drawn to it. Its yellow desiccated flesh contrasted with its silvery exterior, and it lay in my studio, split in half with its innards removed, disturbingly wide-eyed and open-mouthed. It had an expression of horror on its face, if I can read the expressions of fish accurately. I think what frightened me the most about my paintings of it was that its dried yellow meat was the same color as the peaches I had been painting last year: beautiful, lusciously ripe golden yellow peaches, cut open to reveal gnarly, textured, deep red pits, which I equated to human hearts. Those peaches had been part of a series about seduction, sweetness, and temptation, related to a story I wrote about a witch with a peach tree gifted to her by the Monkey King of Chinese mythology. The peaches on this tree she owned granted her ravishing beauty, youth, and immortality as long as she ate them, but if she stopped eating them, she would shrivel and wither into a pile of dust instantly, since she was hundreds of years old. When I looked back at my recent work and connected the dried, dead fish to the ripe, juicy peaches, I realized that my work was a study about the cycle of addiction and the desire to be young, vital, and beautiful forever. The peaches and the fish represented how I felt about my body and my mortality as a human being.
I think this work was very important for me to make for myself, and I hope that other people can take away a message from it as well. Temptation, addiction, decay, and denial of mortality are important themes to me right now, and I know I am not the only one who struggles with these concepts. I’m inspired by Hyman Bloom, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Yoshitoshi, as well as many others. These artists have taught me invaluable lessons about life and art just from looking at their works.
Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
There are so many things I would tell my past self. Learn new skills and try new things even when it’s intimidating or comes out of the blue. The best decisions I have made were probably learning how to cast iron, studying abroad in India, and writing fiction. Create your own genre of artist if what you do doesn’t fit neatly anywhere. Always be humble and work hard, and don’t let competition destroy you. I have come to the brink of destroying friendships with other artists by allowing my competitive nature to corrode my happiness. And lastly, try to allow the natural development of your work as much as possible, instead of becoming frustrated. As a great artist and professor, I had in art school, Malgorzata Zurakowska, said, “Slow down.” She told me to turn my painting around to face the wall for a week so I would stop working on it and let it marinate. I am still learning patience. But I have learned that I cannot expect immediate recognition, and while I piddle around anxiously waiting, I could instead allow life itself to mesmerize me in its unfolding.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
I am currently working at the House of Blues in Boston with a team of in house artists, where I paint on the murals and signs. I also have a website, www.rawiklundart.com, and an Instagram, username rawiklund, where I post my work. I am working on a graphic novel, the beginnings of which are on my website. I take commissions for portraits, album art, paintings, murals, and drawings through my website, email, phone, Instagram, or in person, and if you contact me, you can buy preexisting originals or prints.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rawiklundart.com
- Phone: 617 383 1324
- Email: rosewiklund@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/rawiklund/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rose.wiklund
Image Credit:
Sophia Brown for the picture of me
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