Lars Lerin - Letters to Ingrid

"My dear Ingrid! I think I am going strange." The words adorn a watercoloured letter, addressed to Ingrid Larsson in Sunnemo, written and painted by Lars Lerin. The phrasing is at once candid and tender – and says a great deal about the relationship that existed between Lars and Ingrid. The 23 surviving letters, written between 1986 and 1991, bear witness to a close friendship in which trust, humour and warmth were simply taken for granted.
Immortalised in several of Lars Lerin's early oil paintings, Ingrid emerges as one of those people in whose company he found peace. With her, he could be himself, without reservation. Ingrid was an independent and resourceful person – practical, straightforward and at times plain-spoken – yet at the same time warm and generous. She had a particular gift for creating a sense of security around her, and in the letters it is clear how Lars felt seen, included and understood. The tone is personal and unguarded, at times almost as though he were speaking directly to her across the kitchen table in Sunnemo, through both words and brush.
The letters also carry traces of their own, almost private language – small turns of phrase and expressions that only truly make sense within the friendship. Lars writes, for instance: "we must make sure you get to muck up the wall before autumn comes." The expression was their shared image for the coffee gatherings at Ingrid's home in Nya, Sunnemo. When she made coffee, the pot would often boil over, and the liquid would run down and stain the wall by the stove. "Mucking up the wall" thus became their shared way of talking about sitting down together over a cup of coffee.
The letters are not merely personal greetings. They also carry artistic and historical value. Each one is a small work of art in itself, where watercolour paintings, stamps and postmarks meet directly on the watercolour paper. The letters are snapshots of life, transporting us back to the environments where Lars found himself, while the text portrays his everyday existence and his inner world. Several of the letters were produced during the deeply formative time spent in the Lofoten Islands – a place of rapidly shifting weather, where sun, rain, mist and snow follow one another in quick succession and where the light constantly changes over mountains, sea and harbours. It was here that Lerin refined the painting that would make him a master in capturing the Nordic light. The letters also take us along on journeys to Cairo, Istanbul, Crete and the expedition to Antarctica aboard the M/S Stena Arctica.