Ingela Johansson, the artist storyteller.
“I do believe that we pick colors depending on the landscape around us and that color is connected to our emotions.”
Ingela Johansson was born in Karlstad, Sweden, studied in London and has lived in South East Asia for five years. She has been exhibiting in eight countries and has art collectors in many parts of the world.
Her style is contemporary mixed media and she loves blending coffee, marble and ink into her paintings.
Ingela’s Story
I was born here in a countryside where you see more horses than people while driving. This part of Sweden has vast forests and over thousand lakes and is also home to 5,500 writers. That’s not even counting musicians and artists calling it home.
We basically have a storyteller in each red and white house that you pass by.
I moved to Asia 23 years later. My colors changed while walking in the rain forests and it shifted my color palette. I’ve never used so many colors on a canvas before.
You see, Aboriginal artists only paint using the colors of their family’s land. I felt a strong need to paint the changes in my life as Singapore started to feel like a second home.
Capturing the Changing Landscape
It was not only the colors; it was the experience of almost being able to travel the globe on this small island that is Singapore. It is suddenly so easy to meet all cultures in a background that resonated globalization in every way.
Travelling faster and changing the urban landscape daily, I became interested in capturing this on canvas.
One day, I saw a Buddhist monk outside Prada. I turned this into the first painting on my monk series. It was in a gallery in Singapore that the monk took the stage I was sharing his story and why I thought he was at Prada.
Capturing Perspectives and Colour
My Hindu friend gave her reflection followed by a Muslim art professor, a young Buddhist and an Asian Christian
Our contrasting ideas and identity is met over this piece of art and that was the experience that I had been searching for. The more I travel, the more I learned that a language of colors is universal and it still plays a very strong chord to our identity.
“I grew up as a single child with a dog and artists as my closest companions. When I finally got a friend, I sat up on my toy horse and told him that I was heading for the Wild West. I never got there.”
