KSH is a Norwegian multidisciplinary artist and author working in Northern Europe and Italy.
She specializes in expressionist oil painting techniques employing only a mix of primary colors.
Her style is strongly influenced by her research into Edvard Munch and Oskar Kokoschka. As in the works of Munch, her choice of color is influenced by the cold Nordic sunlight, while the thick texture of many of her oil works is reminiscent of the bold and highly material style of Kokoschka. The entirety of the expressionist movement resonates throughout her art, as well as some specific influence from Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustav Klimt and Jack Butler Yeats.
She is deeply inspired by the complexity of human life, which she represents in the form of portraits, group scenes, and nudes. She firmly believes that portraits should represent the souls of her subjects more than their beauty; because of that, many of her original works represent great souls of the past, such as writers and artists.
Additionally, she extends some of her artistic exploration to other genres, including urban landscapes and nature, where her unique expressionist style becomes more abstract.
Outside of the domain of fine arts, she is a successful author of plays, novels, and poems in English and Norwegian. She dedicates her time to both painting and literature, according to mood and practical circumstances – always experimenting, looking for what resonates with her emotions. Lengthy training in classical music and piano performance completes her truly polyhedral artistic formation.
In all her production, she combines the highest wisdom of classical European culture with a very subjective, deep, and disenchanted view of life.
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
Pearl S. Buck