GÖSTA WERNER. "1930 New York". Signed and dated 66-81. Oil painting on canvas.

The painting is part of the TV program Antikjakten on TV8 episode 3.
Gösta Werner hated being called a marine painter. Because he was not a marine painter. He saw himself more as a painter who drew his inspiration from the sea and from the reality of the sailors on board a boat and their impressions from the ports around the world. He himself was both a sea captain and a meteorologist, and ever since one day in the early 60's, when he rediscovered his old diaries, the inspiration from previous travels came to be clearly seen in his paintings.

It is a folkloric and spontaneous painting with a lot of humor and the paintings often contain the typical icons of sailor life such as boats, sails, flags, buoys, the shifts of the sea and the sky in different weathers, as well as tattoos. Gösta Werner, however, did not have his own tattoos but had, after an admonition from a sea captain, chosen not to get a tattoo. Instead, he chose to paint them on canvas or on paper as small watercolors which he could then combine into different collages.
But Gösta Werner was also very early in using texts, calligraphic characters and stylized letters in his paintings. Sometimes there are phrases from his own diary entries, sometimes names of different ships, known and unknown.
In an interview from 1989, Gösta Werner says - “I think the letters are beautiful and that they are needed in my compositions. When I first went to sea, I saw all kinds of characters, both Western and Oriental, on boxes and bales on board and in port. I usually had no idea what words and signs meant - they were loaded with mystery. And so it still is ”.

Many of Gösta Werner's paintings are also painted directly on canvas. The old canvases rest on exciting secrets after going through unknown adventures such as. hard storms or maybe warm and comfortable sailing in the scorching sun. Gösta Werner often found the old canvases on his travels, among other things they were thrown in the ports in Rotterdam and New York, among other places.
Then letting the canvas emerge through the painting gives another exciting and interesting effect. The structure of the canvas becomes part of the total work of art. The work should also not be locked in a frame but hang freely, as real sails do.

At the end of the 1950s, Gösta Werner lived for a time in Rome. He had a studio in a studio house in Piazza del Biscione where many different artists from different parts of the world worked. Among other things, he hung out with the American artists Larry River and Cy Twombly, who also had studios in the house. The auction's painting conveys the same feeling as these artists' works from the same period and one can fantasize about how their conversations about art were conducted in their various studios.

111 x 126 cm.