Winter has come to Umeå with snow and freezing temperatures, but 2014 is an exciting year since the city is selected as European Capital of Culture (together with Riga). On the official homepage you will find everything you need concerning Umeå 2014 (http://umea2014.se/en/). My first contribution to the festivities (officially starting 31 January) is a blogpost on one of my favorite artists, Vera Frisén. Loved by many here in Umeå, but perhaps not so known outside Västerbotten.

Frisén made a number of portraits, but she was mainly a landscape artist. She found her motif in the outskirts of Umeå and in other regions of Västerbotten, and even if she moved to other parts of Sweden she kept her focus on her native province. Not only that, the majority of her paintings depicts the landscapes in a summer twilight. It puts them in a melancholy mode, like a bittersweet sensation, that also gives the paintings a liminal quality. It is as if nature is standing on the threshold to a new day, a new season, or to some environmental change that might occur. The above painting, called Myr (Bog) dated to the 1970s, shows one of her main motifs, the silhouettes of pine trees on a misty bog on a summer night.

Vera Frisén (1910-1990) made her solo debut at an exhibition in Stockholm 1941, and she held just a few solo exhibitions after that. But she worked continually and exhibited occasionally in collaboration with others until her death. She is still exhibited with some regularity, and will be included in Västerbottens Museum's Resenärens blick (http://www.vbm.se/sv/se-and-gora/utstallningar/2014/resenarens-blick.html) opening on 2 February and lasting throughout the year (at least). If you want to know more of Vera Frisén's landscape paintings, read art historian Felicia Tolentino's dissertation Porträtt av ett landskap: Vera Friséns gestaltning av naturen i Västerbotten from 2008.