Until the age of ten my artistic activities were mostly confined in decorating puja-pandels for children and making invitation cards. I had also some opportunities to make small clay figures which had a life span for only a few days at most. I got my first colors to paint  around the age of fifteen. I discovered these colors in a wastepaper box of my mother`s uncle, who once bought them in Switzerland when he was young. The tubes had dried for not being used for so many years and therefore he had thrown them. These discarded colors opened a new world to me. I made “brushes” by twirling threads around the head of a long sewing needle from my mother`s sewing box, and found unused pages of the chemistry lab report of my elder brother, which he had thrown, for creating my first artwork. Each time I sat to paint, something surprising happened. I saw eyes and faces emerging on the paper though I was not thinking about anything! I could thus discern the existence of a world beyond the visual and perceptual realm. I got so fascinated by this existence outside “myself” that I continued to paint since then.

The next phase of my artistic development came after I got a box of oil color which my father had brought from Moscow from his visit there. The box also included couple of hard brushes. However I had no canvas. I tried the colors on card boards instead. The strange world appeared even stranger and drew me deeper in exploring this weird realm of the mind. I made bigger size paintings, which could not be stored anywhere else except on the floor under my bed where cockroaches lived safely. Within a short time they managed to destroy most of these beloved artworks. Without finding a safe place to store my art, I stopped doing art.

I resumed the artistic activities  again only after coming to Norway. First I painted the whole wall of my room, where I lived, and decorated the door to my room with a surreal face. However, it was not appreciated by the owner of the room (student-town) and I had to pay for washing the walls and retuning the room back to the owner by painting the walls white. So my artistic ambition suffered greatly in the hands of the people who did not appreciate my love for art.

My artistic activities flourished only after I met Ragne. She appreciated my artworks and treated them with respect by framing and hanging them on the walls. After we bought our own apartment in Trondheim, I started making oil paintings to decorate it. The apartment, in fact, became a little gallery of my artworks - surreal eyes and faces stared from all corners!

From Trondheim we moved to Bern in Switzerland. There I got a room in the attic as my art studio. Here I could buy good colors, brushes  and other materials. My desire to sculpt, which I had carried since childhood, came back here. Alpine landscape visible from the Chalet, where we lived, and the flowers in the garden made their ways unconsciously in my art work, which was so far dominated by the surreal.  

From Bern our journey went to New York. From a spacious Swiss Chalet we now moved into a small apartment in Manhattan where I could not have any art studio.  Therefore, during the three years, when we lived there, I did very little artwork.

The art returned again when we moved back to Norway and lived in Oppegård in a house with a flower garden. The activities in the garden spilled over to art. Walking in nature, party in garden etc. began to replace the surreal sphere.

Then a dramatic change occurred. Ånun was killed in an accident on the Alps. The accident changed everything in my universe. I became frantically occupied in keeping Ånun`s memory alive and started painting portraits of Ånun, made a bronze bust and created stone monument where the bust could be embedded.

From Oppegård we went to Geneva. Here my artworks took a new dimension. The most significant painting I did here was the Oppegård graveyard. It was a big oil painting  occupying an entire wall (first landscape painting of my life). Now I used the finest canvas, colors, brushes and art materials available in Switzerland in order to catch the “light” hovering over the landscape. It pushed my artistic abilities to a new level.

From Geneva we came to Seoul, where Ragne became the Norwegian Ambassador to South Korea. Ragne asked me to do a few paintings for the residence. The paintings which I did  received so much appreciation from the visitors that, before we left Korea, I was offered an exhibition space in the Seoul Arts Center. My mind now saw a new horizon. I wished to create an art without beginning and end. An exhibition called “Reality Myth and Dream in the Norwegian Landscape Moving Through Life Death and Resurrection” where mythology, dream and reality existed as one, was held in 1997. I made the paintings in large canvases where the painted mythological figures had real life sizes. With it I could combine ballet. In the exhibition the dancers came out of the canvas as real life figures. Thus I combined paintings, dance and music as one art form.

After this success in Seoul, we returned to Norway. Now we had moved from the house in Oppegård to an apartment in Bygdøy Alle in the center of Oslo. The apartment had high walls suitable for hanging the big painting exhibited in Seoul. Our new house thus became my personal art gallery. With it my imagination flared once again. I wanted to embed virtual galleries in an exhibition held in real space where philosophy and the inner realm of the mind could be integrated. However, I found no appreciation of my ideas in Norway and I had to abandon it.

Since then my interests in art had fallen. While living in Bangkok, where we moved from Oslo, I did some abstract paintings. During this time I got an opportunity to exhibit at the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta and made an exhibition called “Princes Palaces and Puppets of Rajasthan” depicting my travel experience in that part of India. The same exhibition was also held in Udaipur.

After doing these exhibitions I felt that what I was creating in the name of art was not really what I wished to create. How to create the art which I was dreaming of? In fact, what is that art  of my dream? Without finding answer to these questions I stopped doing art for some years.

Then a new phase began after we took over a property by Sognefjord. The summer light by the fjord had a magic effect on my mind. I dreamt to build an atelier there first, where I may do my dream paintings. I saw in my mind the the art called the “Windows of Light”. As I started building the atelier I began creating a painting which would be about eighteen meters long. The idea was to create a painting as a collage of several smaller paintings, where each individual small piece will be able to stand as a painting by itself. However, the true meaning of a painting will only be revealed when it is seen as a part of the whole work. Moreover, these individual pieces could be reordered to create different new views of the “whole”. Thus one could generate several “ whole paintings” by differently assembling the same group of individual  pieces. Thus one could constantly change meaning of the individual art works by changing their associations with the rest. It would thus remain as a never complete, never finished art work! A dynamic art piece where meaning of art would emerge following the movements of the individual objects of art!  

After a few pieces were made and the atelier came in place I was supposed to move my activities to Sogn. However, instead of moving the activities to the new atelier I stopped painting. The garden became my main focus now. While designing the garden the forms seen in the micro-biological world occupied my mind.  I started with the design of the neuronal network. Then the ideas from the cosmos appeared. Bulldozers were called and big boulders from Arnafjord were brought to the garden. The ideas from micro-biology and cosmos were in full swing while landscaping the garden. After the main layout was done and plants and flowers were put in place, the central work of  the garden began.

It started with a “concert place” designed in the form of the Celtic Triskelion, which I had seen in the centers of large scale structures in the universe. Next to it “Buddha head”, surrounded by a spiral flower bed, was placed. Then a sculpture “Spiral in Emptiness”  was set up nearby. The sculpture overlooked the fjord as a frame through which one could view the wonderful light of the sun dancing over the fjord. Then designs in stones (with spiritual meaning like Celtic knots, flower mandala, kundalini, Valknute etc.) followed one by one.

While building the “Garden of Light”, I was taken by surprise as I discovered a special geological stone in the garden: How could these stones (from original crust of Earth) find their ways in the garden? The idea to make a gate with these stones immediately flashed through the mind. So I went  in search for these “Anorthosite Coronite” with the dream of building a “Gate to the Inner Realm”: A gate flanked by two cosmic birds - one coming and the other going. While still searching for the stone I made a virtual 3D model of the gate. When  attempts to find anorthosite coronite failed I decided to build the gate with “Wiscount White”. The sculpture “Spiral in Emptiness” was made of this white granite which came from India.  So I ordered for the Indian granite to build the gate.  Once the gate came in place the garden received its “messenger birds”. Then the sculpture “Cosmic Design” and  other structures followed suit.

As the the garden plan is approaching its completion, the desire of doing paintings are rising once again n my mind. The first attempt to create paintings has turned in the “spiritual direction” reflecting the realm of contemplation and meditation. The second attempt has led me to return back to my childhood art in a more sophisticated way.

I now see a new landscape of creation where poetry, music, art, sculpture etc. may merge together as one arena of creativity - a world,  which I had been dreaming about in search of “art”. Here I meet “Man, Poet and God” and experience the beauty, order and harmony which exist in the universe - from the microscopic world to the realm of the cosmos. My mind now hears the symphony of the universe being played by all living and non-living beings!

May be, such art can not be created by any human being! Again it may be a dream!!!