You already know which wall stays quiet. Mirror Holding Magenta is Sofia Larsson’s Nordlys Flow at its stillest: green, magenta and cold blue flowing over a flat low horizon of water, pale gold at the water’s edge, and almost nothing else in the frame. No pressure on this page, no hidden number, nothing chosen to match a sofa. The magenta falls into the lake and comes back up doubled. The thing hanging in your bedroom now, the one you settled for three years ago, do you still see it?
What the lake does with the magenta
The green band enters high and bends. Magenta flows through the middle of it, soft at both edges, and the water underneath is still enough to take the whole sky back and hand it up again. Two skies. One line between them.
That line is the only line in the picture.
Pale gold sits low where the water meets the far edge, warmth without heat, the way January light behaves at four in the afternoon in Stockholm. No shore. No cabin, no boat, no pine, no bird. Almost nothing else, which is the part that took the work.
Sofia Larsson photographs one view hundreds of times and then takes things out until a horizon and a few tones of light are all that remain. I took four hundred photographs of this horizon. The painting has two lines in it.
Sofia Larsson, Nordlys Flow, and the hour that is nearly over
Hang it where the daylight moves and it will not sit still for you.
Morning reads the gradients cool, almost grey-blue, the magenta holding back. Late afternoon warms it and the reflected band comes forward off the wall. Under a bedside lamp after dark the sky sits closest of all, and the room settles around it.
Valentina, one of the critics who scored it, wrote: “A serene aurora glows, capturing the tranquility of the Nordic night.” The panel average is 8 out of 10.
Someone will stand in front of it and ask you where the lake is. You can tell them what Sofia says: I am not painting the place. I am painting the memory of the place.
The honest part about Mirror Holding Magenta
What you are buying is the artwork, not a picture of the artwork.
Every print in this gallery is a reproduction of a digital original. This one is not a reproduction. It is the work itself, at full resolution, in the medium it was made in, and nothing is lost on the way to paper because there is no paper in between.
Sofia Larsson is a Printasso artist, and Printasso states plainly on its artists page that its artists are not human. The style is the part you can check, and it is right there in the sky.
The file, the paper, and how big this gets
- One JPEG, sRGB colour, 7168 x 9728 px
- Prints to 23.8 x 32.4 in (60.6 x 82.3 cm) at 300 dpi, which is the largest sensible size
- Download link on your order confirmation page and in the confirmation email
- Personal use: print it as often as you like, at any size, for your own home. Not for resale, redistribution or commercial use
- No frame, no paper, no physical object of any kind
Nineteen dollars. The price on the work is the price.
Nothing is posted, nothing waits in a depot, and nothing can arrive damaged, because there is nothing to damage.
At that resolution the gradients stay smooth at full size, which means the wall decides how big this goes, not the file. Ask any print shop or online printer for matte or textured fine art paper rather than gloss, because a sky this smooth will show every window reflection on a shiny sheet. A free wallpaper breaks apart past A4 and a subscription only rents you stock. A framed print at ten times this price cannot be replaced when four years of afternoon sun have pulled the magenta out of it. You can simply print this one again.
Here is the sizing rule: measure the furniture it hangs above and multiply by two thirds. A 36 inch nightstand or sideboard wants roughly 24 inches of width, which is this file at its full stated size, portrait, with the horizon line landing a little above eye height when you are sitting down.
Who should leave this sky alone
Not for a busy room or a bold interior, or anyone who wants a picture to do the talking.
For a bedroom, a bathroom, a clinic wall, a cabin with cold water outside it, for someone who wants less on the wall and means it. A room should have somewhere the eye can rest, and that somewhere takes as much work as anything.
The magenta, and under it the magenta again. Calm is not the absence of anything. It takes work.
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