Inevitably a style of painting speaks of an artist’s frame of mind or circumstances and I was pondering this while cataloguing the work of Sven Berlin in our collection. He was a courageous colourist whose instinctive styles can be tracked through the chapters of his life, rather differently, I thought, to those who limit themselves in an effort to establish an identity.
This detail of a portrait of his daughter, the sculptor Greta Berlin, painted in 1962, while he was confident and celebrated in the New Forest, but with turmoil just around the corner, demonstrates this quite dramatically.
More on Sven and his work can be found at svenberlin.co.uk and in my biography Timeless Man.
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