Steadfast by Annette Falk Lund

About "Steadfast"

by Annette Falk Lund

About the artwork

One head stands on two legs. It has oversized ears and small eyes. The distant, almost absent gaze is directed frontally at us. There is no body at all between the head and the legs. The feet appear to be in ice skates. Two figures facing away from each other, one on the left and one on the right, raise their arms.
The motif is painted in grey and blue-green tones.
The picture was created using a special mixed technique. The so-called stone paper was used, which the artist primarily works with. In the first step, a folded image was created from simple blobs. In the second, a print of this followed. The next step was to (discover) the motif by omitting and adding individual elements using brushes and gouache colours.
"Steadfast" belongs to the series "Face to Face", which are painted using this technique. The inspiration came from the exhibition "Word and Image", which the artist had visited in Lübeck, where paintings and drawings by masterful literary figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo and Wilhelm Busch were on display. However, it was Justinus Kerner (1786-1862), an outsider, who appealed to her the most. As a poet and doctor, he wrote medical textbooks and had developed "blotography".
With the title of the picture, the artist refers to the topicality of steadfastness and calls on us to face up to the questions of our time. Standing firm can mean narrow-mindedness or loyalty to a certain conviction.