Watercolours play an important part in Frans Widerberg’s oeuvre with examples of his observations in numerous sketchbooks. Wherever he travelled he carried watercolours and a sketchbook with him, making spontaneous sketches of his surroundings both in Norway and abroad.

There are many examples of his reworking of observations, especially depictions of the landscape under different lighting conditions; of seasonal changes in the undramatic, intimate landscape of Tovø, an island off the Hurum peninsula in eastern Norway; the ever-changing light reflections of the sun setting and the rhythm of the waves on the Oslo Fjord seen from Nesodden.

A regular visitor to Italy, he became fascinated by the silhouettes of the villages and the cursive stripes of the terraced hillsides of the Faraldi Valley in Liguria. “…. I was completely obsessed by this landscape, by the place and the people. Possessed by the feeling of being away up there – above all the sounds and the shifting light.”

Here, his imagery is organised around distance, looking across a deep valley or a distant view of a small village clinging to the top of a mountain ridge. This is a place where Widerberg’s hoverers emerge naturally, over the rooftops or between the clouds. 

Living in the Italian landscape in the early 1970s brought him back to the Renaissance masters he was passionately interested in as a young man.

Widerberg’s landscape studies can be seen in conjunction with his studies of figures in constant motion. Behind every floating, falling, wandering figure lie whole series of other figures that have realised other options. All are part of the artist’s endless process of investigation and experimentation.