Oil paintings, portraits

I started to paint paintings in oil colours at the age of about twenty. At that time i painted just for fun with no ambitions. Ambitions as a painter came some years later when i was stydying art at a private art school in Oslo, Norway. At that time i was 25 years old wich is kind of late to start painting.
My first paintings where often depicting nature, and sometimes people in nature. After a while when i felt comfortable drawing portraits i started to paint portrait paintings in oil colours.

While i was a student at the art school, i contacted an earlier pupil of Odd Nerdrum who thaught me a little bit about portrait painting. I had contact
with him for a couple of years. I also met Odd Nerdrum and some of his other pupils at different occations.

Paintings in oil has always been my favourite way of making art in general.
I struggled a lot using oil colours in the beginning. It was often very hard to mix the colours correct whether i was painting nature or portraits. But i would never give up paintings in my first years as an artist. And day by day i felt things was getting better on many levels.

One of my brothers is also a painter, and so we kind of competed against each other the first years by showing the paintings to each other and discussing them.

Paintings in general

Some years ago people was talking about that paintings as an art expression was getting out of "fashion". I think that things have changes a little bit the last years, and that paintings in an accepted way of making art again, at least in some groups of people. As many other artists i have also played with thoughts about doing something else as an artist than painting with oil.
But to me painting is the ultimate way of making art. It is in fact the first thing i think about if people start to talk about beeing creative.

Oil paintings in the future