Nordic Light
Golden Cloud - Kerstin Färnert 1999
It’s half past nine on a Saturday evening and I’m with Kerstin Färnert. We’re in the Pakhuset Restaurant on the quayside in Skagen, the most northern town in continental Europe. Only Grenen, the narrow spit of land honed to a point by the battering of the North and Baltic Seas lies between here and Norway. Pakhuset is emptying. Although early in the season, the light will hang long in the air but the local ethic is to rise early, work hard and retire early, so even early on a Saturday night, silence has left the restaurant to Kerstin and to me.
We are looking at two of her paintings, hung side by side. They are both clearly of the same scene but her use of colour confuses me. One is full of mysterious hues of grey, green and gold redolent of the violent seas and tempestuous skies of the peninsula, whereas the other is warm. Ochres across the spectrum between yellow and red.
“I was just married to my second husband,” explained Kerstin “We were at Grenen. Alone. In the dunes…and we were very close…” she added with an allusive smile. Pointing to one painting she said: “This is what I saw,” and then to the other: “But this…is what I felt.”
Ten years earlier, I had read Jonathan Coe’s coming-of-age novel, ‘The Rotters Club’ and its sequel ‘The Closed Circle’. Being of a similar vintage and provenance to Mr. Coe, I had a vague, misty-eyed ambition to tackle similar subject matter at some point but, having read a few pages of the first novel, abandoned the idea as I believe these two books to be peerless. The evocation of the dying days of 1970’s industrial Britain is almost tactile and the progress of the same characters into the minor anti-climax of early middle-age is charted with an eerie resonance.
Both books feature Skagen. In the first, a tragedy is averted at Grenen when a boy, Paul, saves Rolf, an older German boy from drowning in the treacherous currents. In gratitude, Rolf swears he will do anything to help Paul in the future if he can. In a neat intertwining of fact and fiction that runs through both books, Paul is later a Labour MP battling to save the Longbridge car plant from closure by the then owners, BMW. In a news article he sees Rolf is now on BMW’s board of management so contacts his office with the hope the favour will repaid by Rolf convincing the BMW board to reverse their decision about Longbridge. Rolf’s secretary says he would be delighted to meet Paul again. In Skagen.
The chapter that describes this meeting over dinner in Pakhuset is an extraordinary piece of writing, pivotal to the narrative but one that works in isolation and repays frequent re-reading. Among the many strands in Paul and Rolf’s conversation is a meditation on the value of a single human life (Rolf’s) and parallels the situation Paul faces professionally and personally. Another theme is the vanity and shallowness of middle-aged men and how they are simply ‘defective women’. The power of the nearby ocean that nearly claimed Rolf is an ever-present metaphor for the commercial and political realities that threaten to overwhelm them both. Rolf’s resigned conclusion is “some things are just not worth saving”.
The writing is deceptively simple but powerful and Pakhuset so vividly described, I had to take a look myself. So I persuaded my motorcycling companion to take a three-hundred-mile detour on a trip to Copenhagen to visit Skagen and have dinner at Pakhuset. Preferably seated upstairs, surrounded by the “captains’ wheels, rudders, chronometers and nautical decorations of every description,” presumably with the hope that the setting could inspire us both to have a similarly profound and insightful conversation as the characters in the book.
Upstairs was closed so we enjoyed an excellent meal in the main restaurant. After dinner, I asked to go up and have a look round and came across an extraordinary collection of seascapes depicting the savage intensity and raw beauty of the seas around Skagen, bathed in a luminous light. The artist was Kerstin Färnert.
On my return home, I contacted Kerstin to enquire about her paintings. The terms on which the paintings were offered for sale were vague to say the least. Kerstin also was adamant that the sense of movement and intensity in her work would be lost if rendered digitally on a website. Having seen the paintings at first hand, I could see her point and did not argue. She told me that if I was serious about acquiring one of her paintings, we would need to meet - in Skagen - to discuss the matter.
Circumstances intervened so it was not until May 2016, six years after my first visit, that I found myself in Pakhuset again. This time with my daughter who must hold the world-record for the number of times the novels that inspired the original visit have been read by a single person. We went early so I could again look at the paintings and check they still had the same emotional resonance I experienced on first viewing. They did.
After dinner, Kerstin invited us back to her home to look at more of her paintings and drink more wine. She showed me one she thought I might like. It struck a chord and we started an elaborate dance over its’ possible sale. Within a few minutes, Kerstin shook her head sorrowfully and announced she could not bear to part with it. She felt her life’s works had become too fragmented, gracing the walls of collectors across the globe, and she couldn’t bear to part with any more of them. Only if her paintings were curated in a single location, could she bear to part with any more of them.
Although I was disappointed, I genuinely understood her position and backed off and said I would see what I could do to help. This book is the result.
Kerstin’s pictures have no titles and the dates of many are unknown. She says both are unnecessary as it’s only how the picture makes you feel at that moment that matters. When you next look at any one, it should change. No light is ever the same so no moment is ever the same and so it follows, at any one moment it is essentially a different painting.
I’m writing this at the end of August 2016 and another summer’s promise is almost gone. I’m sitting after dinner with Kerstin and Mette & Christopher de Hamel at the home they visit each year, set amongst the dunes south of Skagen.
With daylight fading and the sky, a dynamic continuum of infinite indigo hues, the cloud breaks on the far horizon allowing the lava orange and red of the sunset to fleetingly erupt through. Within minutes, the scene is gone forever as the sky fades to black.