THIS IS HOW IT ALL BEGAN

From early childhood I had a plan. I wanted to be a painter of animals and landscape. I admired my uncle whose paintings hung on the walls of our home and I wanted to be like him. My interest in nature has been accompanied by my devotion for art and painting. There has been no doubt what motifs I would choose. I belong to the egg-collecting generation and my biology teacher encouraged me to collect bird's eggs. It was a good hobby but I was not supposed to take more than one egg from each nest. When my friends played football I climbed up some tree and under a thrush's nest I was bombarded by the parents.

I was top of the class in drawing and painting throughout the school but in other subjects I did not achieve good results. In my plan, there was no doubt about what I would do in the future. The only question was when. It took a few years before I could be a full-time artist. To begin with, I was an illustrator of magazines about hunting and fishing and a writer of articles about nature in newspapers combined with other jobs to survive. I was a waiter, a cook, a plastic worker, etc. But subsequently my paintings gave me an income and I could eventually, at the age of 31, put all other jobs to an end.

I read everything that I could find about the development and history of animal and landscape painting and my rolemodels I found among the Swedes returning from Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and I was inspired by the way they painted landscape. I visited painters that I admired and among them was Lindorm Liljefors, the closest that I could get in comparison with Bruno Liljefors. I also had sporadic contacts with Björn von Rosen and became a close friend to Birger Stafås. Through Birger I learned a lot about the characteristics of painting nature but also how to approach nature that was appealing to me. We often painted and went fly fishing together. If felt empty the day that he put his brushes on the shelf for good. My own niche has over the years formed into two expressions. Landscape, where the mammals or the birds symbolize a smaller part of a full experience is one. The other on is action scenes with birds and mammals in different situations, often with some kind of excitement between pray and attacker.

There was a time in my life when I was stressed by the fact that I could not distinguish what bird's sonng
I heard, what kind of moss that I walked on or the name of the dragonfly that rode on the foam of the stream. I loved words like ornithologist and limnologist. Eventually I came to understand that my call was to describe experiences in nature rather than being a scientist. Here and now - tell the story about what you see - dererum naturae.