East of the Sun and West of the Moon 1914

Kay Nielsen made this image, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and just look at that night scene of deep blues and spectral yellows. It’s like he was building up the image, layer by layer, from the dark depths, letting the figures emerge from the shadows. I can imagine him hunched over this work, maybe in a dimly lit studio, conjuring this otherworldly space. What was he thinking as he rendered the sorrowful troll and the ethereal maiden? What if we think of the surface as a mirror reflecting not just images, but emotions, desires, and dreams? The thin washes of blue create such a velvety feel, don’t they? I keep coming back to the troll's posture, all hunched over, looking so forlorn. Nielsen really knew how to inject such feeling into the scene. You can see echoes of Beardsley and those Art Nouveau guys, but Nielsen brought his own melancholic, fairy-tale twist. We are all drawing from a well, and painting is a kind of embodied expression, right? It's about putting yourself into the work, embracing all the uncertainties along the way.