The Life and Adventures of Anders Gjesdal Oliversen

Maihaugen

I went to Drotten in Lillehammer to see the petroglyphs there, but area was inaccessible due to the high water levels at this time of year.

So I visited the open-air museum Maihaugen, also in Lillehammer, instead.

Large deer species like Reindeer and Moose are very common in the Norwegian Stone Age petroglyphs. As part of the research for Fortidens Norge, where I use drawing to experiment with the interpretation of the Norwegian petroglyphs, I visited a farm with Reindeer and Moose to study these animals.

Ekeberg

I traveled to and photographed the petroglyphs at Ekeberg in Oslo for Fortidens Norge.

Artist Recidency at Seanse

June 13th-June 17th I had an artist recidency at Seanse Art Center in Volda with my project Fortidens Norge (Prehistoric Norway).

In addition to myself there was one other visual artist, one actress, one musician, one group of three actors and one group of two dancers together with a musician having their residency at the same time as me. There were mentors available for discussing the work, and we all presented our work with an audience in the middle of the week. During my stay I mainly worked on how to present and communicate what I am working on with this project. The advice and feedback from the mentors and the other artists having residencies really helped me formulate and improve my plans for communicating about the project.

In addition to everything menitoned above the recidency at Seanse also included the cost of travel, accommodation, meals and a salary. The recidency was a great experience for me and I am grateful to Seanse for supporting the project. Seanse also wrote about my project on their website.

Fortidens Norge / Prehistoric Norway

My project about rock art in Norway is now funded by Kulturrådet (Arts Council Norway). The name of the project is Fortidens Norge, or Prehistoric Norway in English. The funding will allow me to work at least one year with the project. This summer I will travel to many different locations with rock art in Norway to study and photograph the art. The next step will be to draw many iterations of possible interpretations of the symbols found in the rock art. I will be blogging about the project, do presentations/workshops about the work I’m doing, and hopefully I will also do interviews/podcasts with experts in the field of rock art. The planned result is a book publication and an exhibition about the work done in the project.

I am grateful for the support from Kulturrådet and looking forward to dedicating myself to the project full-time and travel around the country to study the rock art in real life.

Moelv Helleristninger Part 4

Some of the figures on side three the Moelv rock are made in a different style than the ones on side 1, and it is probable that more than one artist made the figures on the rock and possibly there were big gaps of time between the creation of some of the figures.

The shape of the head of the top left figure, figure 9, is somewhat different from the other carvings and together with the stocky body it remined me of a bear. One of the lines goes down into the figure below and they might be supposed to be connected in some way, but here i rendered the figures separately.

Silhouette of figure 9 and drawing of figure 9 as a bear.

The shape of the figure at the bottom left, figure 10, reminded me of a donkey with the long ears and tail. Many figures have these internal lines that I in some renderings just incorporate into the fur when rendering, but in this drawing I explored the possibility that the lines may represent parts of the skeleton of the animal. The rock carvings were probably made during the stone age, and there probably weren’t any donkeys in Norway at that time.

Silhouette of figure 10 and drawing of figure 10 as a donkey with exposed muscles, bones and organs.

The middle figure, figure 11, it noticeably less well drawn than all the other carvings on the Moelv rock. Perhaps it was made by an apprentice artist, or perhaps it was made by someone inexperienced that wanted to imitate the other art a long time after the other carvings were done. I rendered this shape as a sort of moose type ruminant, but no animal will fit very well withing the shape of this carving. While i interpreted the vertical lines in figure 10 as ribs, I attempted to interpret them as stripes in the fur of the animal on figure 11.