Detailed Biography I
Sonnenwagen
Eriksdun's work as an artist, that is his painting, can only be regarded as a whole. His work is revealed to us as an integral unit. Everything that characterises his art has always been present since the very beginning of his artistic career. The division into works of the early period, the artistic maturity and the late style, necessary for other artists, appears in his case to be as superfluous as it is in vain.
When Eriksdun completed his study of law in 1933 and decided to become a painter, he was immediately Eriksdun, whose artistic expressions were just as unmistakable then as they are today. His training in law gave him the ability to formulate clearly and precisely. With him, form develops from a spontaneity that is always self-assured, and the form dictates the colour as a necessary consequence. All of Eriksdun's pictures convey a feeling of certainty that this form can only be as it must be and nothing else. In the usual sense of the word, there is no development and this is not negative, rather it is supremely positive. Pictures from four decades -as this exhibition could be entitled -can be arranged adjacent to and opposite each other without great trouble. Works from the beginning of his artistic career hang next to works of the immediate past without any visible sign of a break. Only an observer who has long been familiar with the life-work of the painter now on display will recognise the increasing refinement in the application of the means available to the painter and the perfection in the mastery of technique. In his composition, which develops out of an intellect with clearly stated objectives, the colours are integrated spontaneously but logically, and each of these colours immediately begins to exist for itself. Out of darker areas, lights blaze forth, not lighter colour accents which have been later added, but lighter shades that have been present there from the very start and appear always at the spot for which they were intended. Contrariwise, darker deeper toned colours blend into the lighter colour patches, wherever the brightly radiant areas demand this for weight and solidity. But anyone desiring to classify Eriksdun's painting into one of the many directions of the recent past or the present has a difficult job. Eriksdun's pictures are radiant impressions without being impressionistic. His painting possesses a strong power of expression that cannot fail to be noticed, but it does not belong to expressionism.