Jonas Carping

Jonas Carping is a Swedish musician and oil painter based in the south of Sweden. The work focuses on landscape. Real places, painted slowly, in both full colour and a reduced palette of black, white, and a deep blue-black that holds something of the silence and stillness of the Swedish countryside.

Drawing came first, before the music. I have been drawing from early childhood, then I've spent years as a songwriter and recording artist. The urge to paint never really left. It took a croquis drawing class, sketching fast and without thinking, for something to finally come loose. Since then: drawing, then acrylic, then oil.

The oil paintings are slow work. Layer upon layer, decision upon decision, months per painting. Alongside them I draw in ink, where everything is fast and free. I believe the two feed each other: silence and noise.

My debut series, Värmland, draws from a lifetime of summers in one of Sweden's most rural counties. A farm outside Karlstad, a river and the jetty where I have been fishing since early childhood. The spruce forest on the far bank. The boat trips out to where the river ends and lake Vänern opens like an ocean.

Every painting is an original. There are no prints and no editions. When a work is sold, it is gone.