When I came to Xania there was one thing I immediately

noticed about almost all recent art – some-

thing that I felt was contrary to nature

or my perception of nature – it was the

fact that the painters used a lot of

pale blue tones in their colours in order to achieve distance and

atmosphere in the picture – at the same time I heard almost

everyone say about my own pictures that they lacked

atmosphere and the background was too dark and that I should

use light bluish and diluted tones in the background

in order to create perspective in the picture. I took pains

at first to see these atmospheric effects and even

succeeded in doing so but at the same time ~~found~~ thinking they were so ugly

and facile that I promised myself that I would now try to see

if it was possible to make art without these

atmospheric tones; for they are hardly to be found in Western Norway.

So I painted my first pictures without these atmospheric effects[.]

My pictures were well received yet many felt

that there should be more atmospheric effects in the

background. I objected saying that ordinary people

could not see the atmospheric tones in Western Norway, they saw straight

through the air and right into the thing – they saw grass, ~~and~~

bushes and bluffs in the mountains ^nearly as freshly as and

sharply as the things in the foreground, without di-

luted or artificial small spots of different

colours in order to create a kind of atmospheric vibration in the eye, it

was only trained artists’ eyes that saw such things ~~tones~~

or imagined they saw them – healthy eyes saw straight

through the air without sensing any layer of ^colour between them

and nature, whether it was close up or at a distance + they

could enjoy the ~~charm~~ vibrancy of the local colours. I wanted the

artists as well to look at nature in a healthy and naïve way

like ordinary people and children – the artist should

not be an oculist who looked at nature with artist eyes

spoiled by colour theories, eyes that had stared for so long at colours

that he could no longer look at a single colour without it being

dissolved and broken into the pieces of a rainbow spectrum – I wished to

oppose all of these systems in art, both complimentary colour

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