Tales in Stockholm

January 2013 (I don't know exactly which days, I think it was between 5 and 10 ... I never remember these things), I was a guest in Stockholm in Kerstin Ahlgren's studio (she was leaving for India to make sculptures). Her atelier is in an old large house from the early 1900s, which has three floors of rooms and wooden corridors and another 7-8 ateliers of other artists, all in the middle of a park in the middle of the city. Underground, Enskede Gard stop, go down the stairs, right and straight through the trees, follow the path and look up. We said goodbye to her home. With her family, she cooked, I ironed her summer clothes to pack for the trip. She was a little excited, a little anxious - mothers always are when they leave their whole life behind. Then 4 days of sleeping on the sofa in the atelier with some blankets, some pillows, some books of unpublished and old edition fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, the window, the snow and Stockholm around me. When you are alone in a new city, you walk a lot, and then you stand very still watching, and then you walk again, and again you stand still. You do not eat enough. If you open your eyes at night, you continue to look as if you were on board a train. Every moment is like new and little escapes you and surpasses you and you understand that you will only reach it on the way back and then that it is not even important to reach it ...

I read the fairy tales in the evening, upon returning from my daytime wanderings, between snow and northern light. As almost always happens to me, I refused the idea of illustrating them. Decidedly refused ... and after refusing I made these drawings. A few served as "sketches" for canvases, others are ... what they are. Here they are.