Erik Schurink is a visual storyteller, an artist creating imagery and settings intent on evoking connections between viewer and the subject, and the setting of his paintings and installations.
During his month at NES, he is exploring image making in partnership with rocks, rain and wind, to interpret the land, sea and cloudscapes of Skagaströnd.
The paintings he creates in his studio in Brooklyn, New York often reflect on people in relation to their environment, whether it is museum guards in the gallery they are assigned, or people-at-rest riding the subway waiting to arrive at their destination.
Outdoors—in his “Landscape Arrangements”—he arranges materials found in an environment to create an image using that environment as its canvas, for the unsuspecting passersby to experience a moment of awareness of that landscape, and their place in it.
The fellow artists-in-residence, people living in this town, at these headlands—home of Þordís and those who have come after her—and the conversations had are other sources of great inspiration. Karen Winzer’s “Flecke” project, a sociocultural Rorschach-inspired exploration, seeing people in town readying their homes for winter, and the possibility of witnessing the northern lights before returning to the U.S., have inspired a painting he titled “Transported.”