An Artist in Trondheim

It rains. So we go to the museums. And sometimes I am blown away by an artist, an exhibit, a new way of looking at life.





The Trondheim Kunstmuseum has a summer exhibit on its second floor by Anne-Karin Furunes, a Trondheim artist who teaches at the local university. She creates works based upon archival photographs, often of young people who have been institutionalized at some point in their lives.



She creates her works on huge stretches of dark canvas which she perforates with round holes of different sizes, allowing the white walls on which they are hung to come through to varying degrees. This creates images of great depth, that alter their appearance as you move toward or away from them.







And after wards I walk out into the rain again. We go next door to the museum's cafe, order smorbrod and white wine...light pours in through the windows...the northern light that fills the room with a soft luminescence. And here are other works, bright colors against white walls. But somehow the images on the museum's second floor stay in my mind...creating a different memory of my time in this city.

The sun

Trondheim lies at 63degrees north, about the same latitude as Fairbanks Alaska...somewhat below the Arctic Circle. The relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream create a climate favorable to agriculture. Along the Trondheim fjord are large verdant pastures and fields of potatoes and grains.



But the climate is more typified by rain, snow, and cold, cloudy weather. So the brief summer (late June through mid-August) is tremendously important as a time when bright sunshine and blue skies break through the rain clouds. Keith our American friend who lives here tells us that further north people will stop their cars if the sun comes out strong and will get out and just raise their fair faces to capture some of the precious rays.

Now the sun is at its high point, setting at about 11:30 at night and coming up at 3:00 am. But the sky is bright throughout the night…it never becomes dark. Which I have found is great for driving because you never have to worry about driving in the dark. But of course this is all reversed in winter when the sun is up only up for three or so hours a day.



And so, to encourage the sun, we celebrate St. Hans’ Eve on the 23rd of June (almost exactly half way from Christmas). Bonfires are lit; traditional sour cream porridge is eaten (but others have hot dogs); and dances are held. We attended such an affair at Sverresborg, an outdoor folk museum, just outside the center of Trondheim. Once lit, the pyre of wood blazed and, then, fell over. This did nothing to quell the crowd’s enjoyment of the evening sunshine and the sense that summer had again returned for its brief but very anticipated appearance.

Trondheim

Charlotte and I took the train from Oslo across the breadth of Norway to Trondheim. Trondheim recently celebrated its 1000 year anniversary. It has a deep harbor at the mouth of the Nidelva, a broad flowing river, making it an ideal trading place. Also an area for warfare as evidence by the ruins of the fort at Sverresborg from the 11th century and Germany’s plans to make it the base of its northern Atlantic submarine fleet during WWII.



Trondheim is also the site of the most northern cathedral in Europe. It was built to commemorate the death of Olav Haraldson, better known as St. Olav, who was the first “Christian” king of Norway. Of course that did not keep him from killing as many of his enemies as any other chieftain at that time. But when he was finally killed himself in a battle north of the city, he was quickly elevated to sainthood. The cathedral became a center of pilgrimage which judging by the numbers of tour buses, it continues to be.



The front of the cathedral is filled with statues telling stories. There is Adam and Eve trying to cover themselves after being tossed out of the garden …was it really all about fruit? And lots of kings…but who is the guy holding the basket with three heads? The cathedral is a great tapestry of stories to I guess both enlighten and strike fear into the hearts of believers.




But it also provides, these days, a great backdrop for the site of bike races, people watching, and just general hanging out which have been a few of our much more secular activities this week.

Neighborhoods

Learning to live in a neighborhood is one of the ways of getting to know a country. In Oslo, Charlotte and I have been sharing an apartment in Sagene, a neighborhood once devoted to housing workers from near-by factories. Sagene has gentrified and is filled with young people pushing lots of baby carriages (Norway has the highest birthrate of any EU country). The old factories are converted to offices for small companies. Coffee shops abound. Buses and bikes get folks downtown. And while cars do line the streets, they seem to be used infrequently.

Fort Collins, a town built on a north-south, east-west grid, doesn't prepare you for the twists and turns of the streets that cross streams, run down hills, and feed back upon themselves like growing grape vines. Even with the "where am I" function on my Blackberry, it takes days to figure the layout around the apartment. Learning the high price of food (lemons for $1.20 each), learning how to buy the 24 hour bus pass (only $8), figuring out which local restaurant is affordable (less than $100 for two), learning how to get into the local gym for free (they took pity on this poor foreigner), understanding how the newspaper gets delivered to the apartment door (the paper delivery folks have keys to the apartment houses), reading the signs on the local stores (smadyrklinnik = small animal clinic), ordering the morning latte in Norwegian...it's all part of the experience...actually more interesting often then "seeing" the local sights that tourists are supposed to see.

Vikings, then and now

So you get onto a plane, assuming you make it through the TSA herding procedures, and fly to Oslo...well, with some plane changes. On the way across the Atlantic, you monitor progress in the lite screen built into the back of the chair in front of you. You look out the window at 39,000 feet but there are only clouds below and you wonder when darkness will come and then you realize you are too far north for darkness to come, that light will shine all night and that, for the Vikings who sailed in the waters below you some 1,000 years ago the light may have helped avoid icebergs but then the, again, the stars would not be available for guidance on the long voyages.

Today you visit the Viking ship museum in Oslo and the ships are so elegant and spare in their design and you wonder if the Vikings felt as annoyed with the crowding on their decks and as anxious about possibly falling to the bottom of the ocean as you were on your flight. And did the beauty of the curved design of their prow give them as much reassurance as the 24 media channels provided by Scandinavian Airlines. And is there, perhaps, more similarity than difference between their voyages and ours today...their search for new lands, resources, experiences and our flights to discover new lands or acquaint ourselves with old ones.

Graduation time

So who knew? After three years in Miami and then in DC, we celebrated Tom's graduation from Georgetown Law School. A night out at the 930 Club downtown, watching his boyhood friend, Mick Coogan (of Dance Party), perform. Perhaps not quite in Tom's honor, but we could make it seem that way.














Then a gala dinner dance at the National Building Museum, the old Pension Building, that was the site of Lincoln's second inaugural dinner dance. I had always thought this as one of the great, sometimes overlooked, buildings in Washington. And here we were, dining and dancing and carrying on...as folks, I guess, had been doing for a long time.




Then a formal awarding of degrees and diplomas...only a blurred photo of Tom (really have to learn how to set my camera better to capture these fleeting moments in time, but perhaps also blurring may be appropriate to life that moves so quickly. And then hors d'oeuvres and a final party. Congratulations, Tom. Who knew? I guess you did.

The people

Like any city, New York is its people. Walking, riding the subway, taking the ferry, catching a cab, the city is about people in movement. The movement is interspersed with moments of quiet and anticipation…like the silent intensity of commuters waiting for the ferry to dock in Staten Island so they can catch the bus to home or work.




And then there are the vast collections of people in space….Times Square, for example, which has seen its vehicle traffic reduced to a trickle by the introduction of new passenger areas. So people now spread over the former streets, creating vast sidewalks and esplanades, creating that sense of intense, dense human movement.




Such intensity is not for everyone…Books, ipods, magazines, just staring ahead, all provide an opportunity for a quiet time-out from the constant stimulation.

Art in the Park

Years, perhaps decades, had passed since I had walked up that huge flight of steps leading to the front entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tom and I headed to the glass enclosed Temple of Dendur, where the walls open through glass to the fields of Central Park.

The scope of the museum had so greatly expanded since I last roamed its halls and galleries. Many of the new galleries and additions were glass enclosed, opening the vast inner rooms to alternating courtyards of sculpture and architecture (entire facades of buildings built into the sides of soaring atriums). The “traditional” galleries also filled with light…lighting up the faces of people, especially the children, who had come to enjoy the lavish collections that the wealth of New York provides for the world.





Tom and I wandered up to the roof sculpture garden where “Big Bamboo” was under construction…a work “in progress.” The flexibility and strength of bamboo allow creation of pathways up into the structure; small groups of tourists thread their way up and around the poles which appear to be growing out over other portions of the museum’s roof top. Workers (or are they architects) add new elements to this growing organic work….quite unlike the finished stone and metal works in the galleries below. Beyond “Big Bamboo,” the city rises along the southern rim of Central Park.





Tom and I drink mojitos from the bar on the roof garden and share a ham and cheese sandwich, watching the bamboo unfold its wings above us. We stand up and look over the edge of the roof to the skyscrapers along Central Park South. No other place is quite like this on this sunny spring morning.

Guggenheims in Leadville and Beyond

It was raining when Tom and I got to New York last month. The heavy rain drove the tourists (like us) inside to the museums. After getting into our apartment, we wandered into the Guggenheim and joined them. The Guggenheim family had made its initial wealth with investments in gold mining in Leadville, the Colorado mining town. They had come to open a mercantile store and invest in the boom of the 1870s and 1990s. They poured their profits into smelting the ore, first in Leadville and then in Pueblo. And money begat money. A few generations later, the investments were in art and in museums that are themselves works of art, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim on 5th Ave. A long way from Leadville.

The museum was jammed, damp with tourists’ wet clothes and umbrellas, but the building, as always, shown for its originality and form. The current exhibit, though, entitled “Haunted” was frankly (sorry Frank) terrible…I am still haunted by how awful it was. Random collections of photos, intellectual pomposity, artistic clap-trap. An elderly couple approached one of the guard-guides who attempt to keep the public from taking photographs (of the photographs) and asked in the most polite and refined manner: “Could you tell us where the art is?”

Time Out

To get to Colorado's Orient Land Trust and its hot springs, you turn east after coming south off Poncha Pass from Salida. Leaving 285, the road is dirt. Great clouds of dust swirl up behind the back tires. Sunday evening at 7:00 pm, the place is quiet. Weekend folks have left. A few families with children play in the pool.

Even after my second retirement and the greater access to my own use of time, the last few weeks have been intense. And I have not had time to write and reflect. So I will spend some of my time here this morning to let my body catch up with my mind. And get ready for the journeys ahead. All of which will require some backtracking, some posting of people and places that occupied the last month, even months. Maybe I should have stopped off here for a week.