Stig-Ove Sivertsen
Petter Dass gt 1
8656 Mosjøen
Tlf: 0047 958 95 603
Epost: stig(a)sosivertsen.no
“I live and work in Mosjøen i northern Norway, where I have my studio and gallery. Over the years, I have participated in various exhibitions both domestically and internationally, but my works are primarily sold through my own gallery – Galleri SOS”
“Unease – I know a lot about it. Or emptiness of thought. I don’t like the pure white surface. It makes me restless. That’s why I just start painting. I like it raw and far from idyllic. Everything dissolves and disappears in the end. Stormy weather. Run-down houses. Wrecked cars. Rust. Pollution. Skulls. Melancholic faces and still life. Landscapes, as they were created, without order. Often, I am surprised. Actually, always. Suddenly I see what I’m painting, even though it only almost resembles it. Then I’m satisfied for a while. Until I face the next white and feel restless again. Style? I don’t know. What it’s about? I can’t say because then everyone knows. But I hope you see that these are my paintings.”
Latest works are presented in my own gallery in Mosjøen.
Stig-Ove Sivertsen | Watercolour Art from the North
Art as Exploration
Stig-Ove Sivertsen is a Norwegian visual artist based in Mosjøen, Northern Norway. Over several decades he has developed a distinctive artistic practice rooted in the landscapes, weather systems and shifting light of the North. Best known for his watercolours, he also works with acrylic painting, photography and digital media.
For Sivertsen, art is less about depicting reality than investigating it.
A blank sheet of paper or canvas is not an empty surface waiting to be filled. It is the starting point of a journey, an opportunity to discover something previously unknown.
He describes each new work as an exploration of possibility, intuition and subconscious thought. Rather than following a predetermined route, the process unfolds through observation, experimentation and response.
This investigative approach runs throughout his practice. The finished work is often less important than the discovery that occurs while creating it.
From Passion to Profession
The ambition to become an artist was never the result of a single defining moment. It had always been present.
Drawing and visual expression were a natural part of childhood, and an early pencil portrait of Jimi Hendrix remains an important milestone. Not because of the subject itself, but because it represented a moment of realization: almost anything could be learned through dedication and practice.
The transition from hobby to profession happened gradually. While still employed full-time, Sivertsen found customers arranging to purchase paintings during lunch breaks. Those small but meaningful encounters suggested that there might be a future beyond creating art solely for himself.
Eventually he chose to take that chance.
The North as Experience
Many artists paint landscapes. For Sivertsen, landscape is not simply a subject matter.
It is a condition of life.
Living in the far North means existing within dramatic seasonal contrasts. Long periods of darkness and cold are followed by summers where light and growth, fertility and life, activity and harvest and human endeavour seem compressed into a few intense weeks.
These conditions shape both the environment and the people who inhabit it.
As a result, Northern Norway appears throughout his work not as geography, but as experience.
His paintings are rarely concerned with documenting specific locations. Instead, they explore how weather, light and place influence memory, perception and emotional life.
Weather, Transition and Tension
One of the defining features of Sivertsen’s artistic language is the ever-changing weather of the North. It is often said that all four seasons can be experienced in a single day, and this constant state of transition has become a recurring theme throughout his work.
Storms.
Snowfall.
Changing skies.
Darkness giving way to light.
Light disappearing into darkness.
What interests him most is often not the event itself, but the transition.
The moment before.
The moment after.
The brief interval when opposing forces coexist.
Many of his paintings function as windows onto these encounters with the elements. Watercolours with titles such as The Storm, A Hint of Light, Darkness Reaches Toward the Light and After the Wind Had Ransacked the Mountain are less concerned with landscape as scenery than with nature as force, presence and experience.
Why Watercolour?
Watercolour is frequently associated with delicacy and control.
For Sivertsen, it offers something quite different.
He is drawn to the medium precisely because it resists complete control.
Dense pigments flow across the surface.
Water follows its own course.
The paper responds in unpredictable ways.
Drying creates textures and structures that cannot be entirely predicted.
Even after decades of experience, watercolour remains capable of surprising him.
This uncertainty is not a limitation but an essential part of the process.
It requires decisiveness, trust and a willingness to fail.
Large-scale watercolours, in particular, demand a degree of courage. Once the pigment is applied, there is often no way back.
Light Emerging from Paper
One of the defining characteristics watercolours is the way flowing pigments is usedto reveal and preserve light.
Unlike oil or acrylic painting, where light is often painted onto the surface, watercolour allows light to emerge from beneath it.
The white paper becomes the source.
Transparent layers of pigment allow the surface to shine through, creating luminosity, depth and atmosphere.
This quality makes watercolour particularly suited to expressing the subtle and often fleeting light conditions found in Northern Norway.
Throughout the work, darkness is rarely an endpoint. Instead, it becomes the condition through which light gains meaning.
Between Representation and Abstraction
Although landscape remains central to his practice, many of Sivertsen’s works resist precise geographical identification.
This ambiguity is intentional.
He has little interest in functioning as a cartographer or guide.
What matters is not whether viewers recognise a particular mountain, coastline or fjord.
What matters is whether they recognise the feeling.
Many viewers experience a curious familiarity when encountering these paintings. They may never have visited the place depicted, yet the atmosphere feels known.
By withholding certain details, Sivertsen leaves space for interpretation.
The painting remains open.
The viewer becomes an active participant.
When a Painting Comes Alive
For Sivertsen, a painting begins to live when its internal dynamics start to function.
It is difficult to define precisely.
Where flowing pigments meet dry brushwork, creating rhythm, tension and movement.
Where textures, lines and directional forces guide the eye through the composition.
Forms and surfaces begin to interact, finding a delicate equilibrium as the image acquires a life of its own.
It is defined not only by what is present, but equally by what is left open to interpretation.
Whatever the cause, the result is a sense of energy that extends beyond subject matter.
The image becomes more than a description.
It becomes an experience.
Art as Dialogue
While exploration lies at the heart of Sivertsen’s artistic practice, exchange is equally important.
A painting does not need to offer answers.
Instead, it should open a space for reflection, memory and interpretation. Rather than directing the viewer toward a single conclusion, the work invites a personal response shaped by individual experiences and perspectives.
In this sense, meaning emerges through an exchange between artwork and viewer. The painting is only one part of the conversation. The observer completes it.
He has witnessed viewers interpret works in ways he never anticipated. On one occasion, a painting he considered relatively modest moved a grown man to tears.
Moments like these reinforce his belief that artworks acquire new meanings once they leave the studio.
The artist’s task is not to control interpretation.
It is to create the conditions for it.
Galleri SOS
Galleri SOS emerged from a practical need.
When Sivertsen helped establish the Galleria Art Festival in Mosjøen in 2006, to create opportunities for artists who might otherwise struggle to find a place within traditional institutional structures. There was a lack of independent exhibition spaces available to emerging artists.
Over time, the temporary exhibition venue evolved into a year-round gallery for him self.
Today, Galleri SOS serves as Sivertsen’s primary exhibition space, while also functioning as a framing workshop, gallery and a platform for art, design and contemporary craft – also online (www.gallerisos.no). The gallery is managed by his wife, Marit Sivertsen, whose role has been instrumental in its continued development and daily operation.
The Studio as Laboratory
Sivertsen does not think of his studio, located just outside the centre of Mosjøen, as a place of inspiration. Instead, he describes it as a laboratory for exploration, experimentation and discovery.
This mindset has led him beyond watercolour into othert forms of painting, digital media and photography. Here, an ongoing exploration of form, content and visual expression unfolds.
In recent years, this has led to the development of a series of partly surreal acrylic paintings inspired by music. Far removed from the landscapes for which Sivertsen is best known, these works venture into a more associative and narrative realm.
Tentatively titled Every Picture Tells a Story, the project is envisioned as a future exhibition in its own right.
The common thread, however, remains the same:
Exploration: Every new work is, in some sense, a new investigation.
A Diverse and Distinctive Practice
Asked to summarise his artistic practice in three words, Sivertsen chooses:
Diverse. Experimental. Distinctive.
The description is apt.
Across several decades he has developed a body of work deeply informed by the realities of Northern Norway while addressing themes that extend far beyond any specific geography.
Weather and light.
Darkness and memory.
Resilience in the face of change.
These themes recur throughout Sivertsen’s work, forming a visual language shaped by both the landscape of the North and the human experience of living within it.
His paintings invite viewers not simply to look, but to linger.
To remain with an image long enough for something unexpected to emerge.
Perhaps that is where their lasting power resides. Not in what they explain, but in what they continue to reveal.
Artistic Development: From Pencil Drawings to Large-Scale Watercolours
Like many artists, Stig-Ove Sivertsen began with a pencil.
From an early age, drawing was both a fascination and a means of understanding the world. One of the works he still remembers most vividly is a pencil portrait of Jimi Hendrix completed during his school years. Not because it became an important artwork in itself, but because it marked a moment of realization. The drawing demonstrated that skill could be developed through persistence, and that visual expression offered endless possibilities.
Unlike many professional artists, Sivertsen did not follow a traditional academic route. He is self-taught, drawing inspiration from a broad range of experiences both within and beyond the arts. Over the years he has worked in graphic design, illustration, marketing, communications and publishing, all of which have influenced his understanding of composition, visual storytelling and audience engagement.
What has remained constant throughout his career is a reluctance to become comfortable. New techniques, materials and working methods continue to challenge and expand his practice. Even after producing thousands of artworks, he regards himself less as a master of a medium than as a perpetual student of it.
This commitment to exploration has allowed his work to evolve continuously. Alongside watercolour, he now works with acrylic painting, photography and digital media, often moving between disciplines as ideas develop.
For Sivertsen, artistic growth comes not from repeating what has already succeeded, but from pursuing what remains unknown.
Recurring Themes and Selected Works
Certain themes appear repeatedly throughout Sivertsen’s body of work. Weather is one of them.
Not weather as a spectacle, but weather as a state of transition. The moments when darkness begins to gather, when a narrow band of light breaks through cloud cover, when a storm approaches, or when silence returns after the wind has passed.
In works such as The Storm, A Hint of Light and Darkness Reaches Toward the Light, these fleeting transitions become the central subject. The paintings are less about depicting a particular landscape than about conveying an experience of change.
Another recurring theme is stillness.
In works such as After the Wind Had Ransacked the Mountain, the focus shifts away from the drama of the storm itself toward the calm that follows. The contrast between turbulence and quiet becomes a reflection on resilience, recovery and the cycles that shape both nature and human life.
Human presence also appears throughout the work, though often indirectly. Boathouses, weathered buildings, abandoned structures and traces of habitation emerge within the landscape as markers of endurance. Paintings such as Stubborn Boathouses in the Southeast Wind explore the relationship between human persistence and the forces of nature.
Many of these works occupy a space between representation and abstraction. They provide enough visual information to invite recognition, while leaving room for viewers to bring their own experiences and memories to the image.
Exhibitions, Collaborations and Public Collections
Over several decades, Stig-Ove Sivertsen has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Norway and abroad. His work is represented in both private and public collections.
His work is represented in a number of private and public collections, including The Royal Palace, Oslo, Nordland County Municipality, Telenor, Equinor, British Petroleum, Norsk Tipping and SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge.
While exhibitions and acquisitions form an important part of his professional career, collaboration has also played a significant role.
One particularly memorable project was Perpendikulør, presented in the former door and window factory building in Mosjøen in 2019. Created in collaboration with musician and producer Fred Endresen, the exhibition combined visual art and sound into a unified experience. Endresen’s immersive soundscape transformed the exhibition space and created a dialogue between image, atmosphere and memory.
Projects such as this reflect a broader characteristic of Sivertsen’s practice. Although painting remains central, his artistic interests extend beyond any single medium. Photography, music, literature and digital technologies continue to inform and enrich the development of new work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Stig-Ove Sivertsen?
Stig-Ove Sivertsen is a Norwegian visual artist based in Mosjøen, Northern Norway. He is best known for his expressive watercolours inspired by landscape, weather and the changing qualities of northern light.
What type of art does he create?
His practice includes watercolour painting, acrylic painting, photography and digital media. While landscape is a recurring theme, his work often moves between representation and abstraction.
Why is watercolour such an important medium in his work?
Watercolour offers a unique combination of transparency, unpredictability and luminosity. Its ability to allow light to emerge through layers of pigment makes it particularly suited to expressing the atmospheric conditions that characterise Northern Norway.
Are the landscapes based on real places?
Sometimes. However, many of the landscapes are composites or imagined spaces shaped by memory, experience and intuition rather than direct observation. Atmosphere is often more important than geography.
What themes appear most frequently in his work?
Recurring themes include weather, seasonal change, darkness and light, the sea, human traces within the landscape, memory, resilience, transformation and impermanence.
What inspires his artistic process?
Nature remains a significant source of inspiration, but equally important are curiosity, experimentation and the desire to discover something unexpected during the act of painting.
What defines a successful work of art for Stig-Ove Sivertsen?
A successful work of art is one that conveys an idea, feeling or story without explaining everything. It should invite reflection, curiosity and personal interpretation, while maintaining a strong sense of originality and visual coherence.
Which artists have influenced him?
Among the artists he has cited as important influences are Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dahli and the Norwegian painter Håkon Bleken.
What is he working on today?
Alongside his ongoing watercolour practice, Sivertsen is currently developing a series of more or less surreal acrylic paintings, inspired by music, that explore new directions and possibilities within his artistic practice.
Can visitors see his work in person?
Yes. Original artworks can be viewed and purchased through Galleri SOS in Mosjøen (www.gallersos.no). Sivertsens artist is also presented at www.sosivertsen.no. Galleri SOS serves both as a gallery dedicated to Sivertsen’s work and as a showcase for selected contemporary crafts and design objects. .
Facebook: facebook.com/sivertsenart
Instagram: instagram.com/sivertsenart
What defines a successful artwork for Stig-Ove Sivertsen?
A successful artwork is one that communicates an idea, emotion or story without explaining everything. It should invite reflection, curiosity and personal interpretation while maintaining a strong sense of originality and visual coherence.
Conclusion
Over several decades, Stig-Ove Sivertsen has built up an artistry characterised by an enduring interest in the changes of nature and man’s encounter with them.
Weather and light, darkness and memory, presence, resilience and change are recurring elements in his work. The landscape functions not only as a motif, but as a space for investigations into how people experience nature, time and belonging.
The images do not necessarily seek to provide answers. Rather, they open up for reflection, recognition and one’s own interpretations.
Perhaps their strength lies precisely here; not in what they explain, but in what they continue to uncover over time.
The Art of Watercolour, June 2017
The Art Of Watercolour, December 2023
Splash 2018: The Best of Watercolor. (Book)
Member of:
Norwegian Association for Independent Artists (Norsk Forening for Uavhengige Kunstnere, NFUK)
The Nordic Watercolor Society (Nordiska Akvarellsällskapet, NAS)
The artist group Hydropower together with Per Vikan og Morten W. Gjul.
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