This was my view last night at about 10:00 pm on the island of Tjörn. We’re still coasting along the spectacularly beautiful Swedish west coast after celebrating Midsummer’s Eve thoroughly with old friends and several new acquaintances. This turned out to be a good way to distract our minds from our traditional Midsummer venues in Vejbystrand.

As a teenager and young tween, I spent significant time sailing, hiking and camping in the archipelago of Bohuslän. First as a scout leader and then with friends. We’d borrow or rent a sizable boat and sail between islands, islets, and coastal villages where we’d anchor for the night and with some luck, find a boat party to crash.

I haven’t sailed in quite a while and like a lot of stuff from yesteryear, I miss it. The last time I was part of a “crew” was in San Diego Bay during a lavish press trip. I spent a full day of match racing on one of two giant boats that had previously been part of the America’s Cup competitive sailing circuit.

Even counting all the amazing places I’ve been fortunate to have experienced so far, Bohuslän maintains its stable pole position as one of a handful of places I can’t get enough of and always look forward to returning to. At least in the summertime.

This year, I’m supporting Charlotte with visuals from a few choice destinations on the islands of Tjörn and Orust.

This is a frame grab from a short, vertical film I shot yesterday while painting the final strokes on “Old Glory 1776”, the last art piece to be created in the Pop Up Gallery here in Malmö.

As implied by the name, I wanted to open up a provisional, post-pandemic creative space in our neighborhood. So, today, after four months, I’m closing the Pop-Up Gallery. The gallery is open today 12-16 if you want to drop by and say hi.

The space has facilitated a really smooth transition back to my creative roots as a more hands-on visual artist and painter. I am grateful for all the visitors and thrilled that so many found the gallery and bought my work. Thank you!

Here are a few tunes that I’ll typically hear during the course of a painting session. How long is a typical painting session, Joakim? Well, it can last anywhere from one to five, or at best six hours. It all depends on the flow. I realized at the onset that my return to drawing and painting my primary way of expressing myself creatively was going to take time. No illusions. But what’s super interesting is that once I think I’ve captured my painter’s mojo, it slips from my grip – if I’m not paying attention. This tells me that I need to focus less on other creative mediums and focus more on painting.

I don’t know exactly why I picked Cheese Doodles to illustrate this post. Possibly because I often use asymmetrical patterns and the color orange in my artwork. Both of which I associate with jazz music. Or, just because I happen to enjoy Cheese Doodles once in a while. Go figure.

I captured these two monkeys a few years ago deep inside a national park in South East Asia. Keep reading and you’ll soon understand why I chose this somewhat bizarre image to illustrate this strange post.

When I woke up this morning, I remembered unusually large chunks of what I had dreamt. As is usually the case when I do recall dreams, which is rare, there was no motion or sound. It’s more like still images or screenshots. As I was going through the two or three visuals that remained in my memory, an interesting thought popped up.

At present, artificial intelligence is only capable of producing stuff that is somehow based on or a derivative of the knowledge that we humans have supplied or made accessible to the computers that host the AI software. Which is basically the same fundamental prerequisite for our dreams.

Dreams are dependent on what we experience while awake. Some argue that even a fetus can dream from what it experiences in the womb. I don’t know if I buy into that theory.

But I am pretty sure that if humans lived in a total void with zero stimuli, our brains would likely not be able to generate any dreams. At some point our brains might be capable of accessing genetically stored stuff (instincts, smells, or sounds?) and somehow create a bare minimum of stimuli, just to keep us from shutting down entirely and croaking.

Perhaps our brains – as well as the brains of many other mammals (and even birds!) are the OG of AI. And if we allow something to alter our circuitry (neural pathways and axon-collaterals), we could finally evolve beyond our present just-barely-beyond-monkey phase where tribalism inevitably leads to war, devastation, and possibly annihilation of our species (and the planet!).

See how the above photo makes at least a little sense now?

Anyway…

As surreal as my dream was last night, which, incidentally, took place on a hot, stormy beach surrounded by snowy hills, the “cast” and the scenery were easily recognizable and left me with a much stronger visual memory than anything I’ve seen generated so far by DAL-E 2, Midjourney or Dream Studio.

This is a new painting with a numerical (birthday) theme that I’m currently working on. It’s a work in progress, so it might change over the next few weeks or whenever I feel it’s finished. Even if I am way too illogical and irrational to be good at anything but rudimentary math, I am fascinated with numbers.

Since the Pop-Up Gallery is closing in a few weeks, this might be one of the last art pieces I create there. Come July, I’ll have returned to my home studio. At least until I find a new space to rent. While certainly large enough for painting – by a wide margin – the current location on Hallenborgs gata turned out to be way too desolate. At least for an art gallery. Ce la vie.

Here’s an aerial view of the canola fields in southern Sweden with Malmö and Västra Hamnen in the background. I’ve not had an opportunity to enjoy the canola flowers up close this spring, but there are plenty of images stored in my archive with photos and footage of the beautiful, blooming yellow flowers captured from both the air and ground throughout southern Sweden. I’m considering a book totally dedicated to canola flowers which I might be tempted to give a title along the lines of “Mellow Yellow” or “Raboff’s Rhapsody in Yellow”.