Page 109 - Källemo 2019

NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC MATS THESELIUS
My father, Pär Andersson, was an artist who became Sweden’s most prolific church painter. Nature and greenery were his habitual motifs. When I asked my dad why he painted plants, he told me that it all began when he and a few architect friends designed a studio building for our garden in Ålsten, Bromma. Once the house was finished,
the huge studio windows looked out on what was basically a muddy slope, but when things started growing, the view was filled with the greenery that oozed out of the ground. For Pär, who was looking for new Christian imagery, this thriving life force came like
a revelation and the best story about creation.
The experience accompanied Pär throughout all his commissions, and plants became his emblem.
I often talked to my father about the possibility of using some of his motifs in a design context, as wallpaper or as decorative elements. But I never got round to doing it until now. I used the branches for the first time when designing the 25th Anniversary National Geographic cabinet. The very first cabinet was green, but the final version was yellow. Then I started thinking about why the cabinet had been green originally. It was covered in green linen cloth, like a binding for the whole cabinet instead of for each separate book. I realised I had been nurturing a vague idea of having a “National Geographic” pattern printed on the cloth, but I never followed it through. After ruminating on why
I had chosen green instead of the journal’s signature yellow colour, I realised that green was actually more congenial, in view of the close link between the magazine and nature. The obvious choice for the anniversary cabinet was, of course, a pattern of leaves.
Mats Theselius
The painting by Pär Andersson is cropped.
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