The mesmerizing futuristic landscapes of Simon St å lenhag

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The natural beauty of the Swedish landscape has fascinated artist and designer Simon Stålenhag from an early age, who grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm. It was by portraying landscapes and animals in the spirit of his favorite Swedish artists that he first became seriously interested in painting. Subsequently, Stolenhag turned his hobby into a career, and he still paints the same landscapes, only now they are filled with robots, dinosaurs, and incredible machines.

Stolenhag came up with a whole backstory that formed the dystopian reality of his paintings:

“In the 1950s, the government launched a huge nuclear accelerator and research laboratory just a few kilometers from Stockholm. The laboratory is located underground and produces a large number of experimental technologies. Until the 70s, everything goes well, but then the system begins to collapse. Bad things start to happen. The images on my website show the life of the people of that world, and how it was influenced by the fiasco of a gigantic scientific project. Nobody knows how it will all end."

Although Stolenhag now paints new paintings, guided by his own dystopia, he says that this story was born from his paintings, and not vice versa. “I started painting them in my free time, as a hobby, without any particular idea or general idea,” explains the artist. - As time went on, I uploaded more and more works to the site, all these thoughts about the world in the pictures accumulated in my head, so I began to write them down. The result is a solid backstory, which now helps me a lot in creating new material."

All of his work is drawn with an electronic pen on the same Wacom tablet that the artist uses for commercial orders for films, advertisements and video games. It doesn't matter what Stolenhag draws, whether it's an Allosaurus stepping on a truck right in the middle of the road, or a group of kids watching the sunset on a cliff, behind which the outlines of huge, faded glowing factory buildings can be seen, in any case, the digital image will look almost like an old one. kind oil painting on canvas. “I started out with watercolors and gouache, so I try to mimic the traditional workflow as best I can, putting a lot of effort into making the electronic brush strokes look natural and maintain a hand-made quality,” says Stolenhag.

But what makes the artist's work really interesting is the amazing atmosphere of "normalcy" of what is happening. The people in the paintings live their daily lives, oblivious to the incredible machines that surround them. Levitanian-style restrained rural landscapes look completely peaceful. Sleepy fields sway, the wind rustles in the trees, children laugh in the distance, and only sometimes the idyll is disturbed by the whistle of a giant flying tractor or the electric crackle of the nearest hadron collider.

Another science fiction fan, Leo Eguiarte, also creates his own worlds of a fictional future, but works in a completely different pictorial style.