Gunnar Tryggmo
A touch of nature
Now open at Turner Fine Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is One Touch of Nature, a new solo show for Swedish watercolorist Gunnar Tryggmo. His new works sample wildlife from two very different places. “It’s a meeting between Africa and Wyoming, [from] birds and animals from the open meadows and valleys in Yellowstone to the great plains in Kenya and Tanzania. Nothing from my home habitat this time, except maybe some circumpolar species like the peregrine falcon and a raven who could have been from here, too,” he says. “The inspiration and references for the U.S. paintings are from trips to Jackson over the years since my first time in Wyoming in 2011 to last year’s first winter week, which gave me a new landscape. Two of the African paintings are from one Tanzania safari in 2012, the rest are from a fantastic journey in Kenya in the fall of 2018. From Samburu in the north over the highlands to Masai Mara in the south. I have a special place in my heart for the dry-season colors. It suits my painting style in watercolor very well, simple earth colors with focus on the animals, the light and composition.”
In addition to more traditional sizes and formats, Tryggmo has painted several works that exemplify his interest in negative space, unpainted areas of his paper and the vastness of nature. “I like to play with unusual formats and open, unpainted spaces in my compositions. Sometimes I use the narrow format to increase the horizon, sometimes it simply suits the composition with the placements of the elements as I drag the viewer to the focal point,” he says. “There is something with the white unpainted paper, with the unpredictable together with the planned…maybe it gives something to the viewer’s imagination,
like abstract parts of a painting that can make the main thing even more realistic. In some compositions it comes easy but it’s more common that I struggle with the outline washes than the main subject. In some paintings I wish to give the feeling that I just dropped my water bucket and some colors over the painting and it ended up with a bird painting.”
Although Jackson Hole is thousands of miles away from Sweden, Tryggmo says the two destinations share many qualities. And even in Sweden, the American West is an idea that many are familiar with.
“Swedish people generally have the perception of the West depending on what input they have. Some still have the old mainstream [images] from movies. I have the feeling that most people are thinking about the western United States as a country with spectacular views, big mountains and endless prairies. They know the names like Grand Canyon and Yosemite, but they can’t place them on a map,” he says. “There have been many wonderful documentaries about the Yellowstone area, and we often think the Tetons are Yellowstone. I did myself before I had been there and recognized it was two parks with different nature…sweden is different but very much is quite the same. The mountains are not so steep here.”