SanitaBalode 

I live in Voss because the mountains are right there.
Not as a backdrop.
As a presence.

I ski, I walk, I breathe the kind of air that makes you feel like you actually exist.

It is also a place where people throw themselves off cliffs for fun. Where extreme sport is not something you watch on a screen but something your neighbour did this morning. That energy gets into you whether you want it or not.

My paintings come from that place. Not from the mountains themselves but from what happens inside people who keep pushing toward them. The need to go further. Faster. To see what is on the other side of the horizon. I do not think that impulse ever fully makes sense. But I recognise it. I feel it myself.

What I try to catch in paint is the moment just before everything becomes clear. The uncertainty that sits right next to hope. The not knowing mixed with the absolute need to find out.

I work with colour and rhythm and movement. I stop a moment that would otherwise disappear. I try to make visible something most of us only feel for a second before it is gone.

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Sanita Balode holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia and has been a practicing artist since 2002. She has lived in Norway since 2011 and is a member of the National Association of Norwegian Visual Artists (NBK) and the Visual Artists Association of Hordaland (BKFH).