"Moutmarka" - Dry Pastel - 55x75cm - 2010
Rune V. Cappelen Strømsted
is a fine arts artist living in Vestfold, in southern Norway. He is member of The Association of Norwegian Fine Arts Painters (Landsforeningen norske malere-LNM) and The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists (VBK-NBK).
The artist is a graduate of Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO), where he majored in Fine Arts Painting. In the course of his career, he has worked with a variety of expressions, but landscape painting has always formed the basis of his artistic work. His main painting mediums are oil, acrylic and dry pastel.
Strømsted's image world consists of scenery with wide views, distant horizons, and spacious and frequently descriptive skies. His paintings and pastels provide a quiet, poetic atmosphere that allows for reflection, often evoking in the viewer a sense of “the inner landscape” -- the spiritual world beyond the more apparent and the mundane.
The artist's images are located somewhere between dream and reality. There is warmth and closeness in the landscapes, but they can be accompanied by an uncanny silence and solitude-- ambiguities that make Rune's work susceptible to different interpretations.
The artist strives to have his motives communicated in subtle rather than obtuse ways. This subtlety is achieved in part because of his mastery and use of a rich color scale, which he employs with a light touch tempered by his knowledge of coloristic tools.
Strømsted is established in Vestskogen, Nøtterøy, where he shares a studio with his wife Victoria Belyashova, a painter and illustrator, who is also a member of The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists.
