“The two of them” - him and her, two figures. She is slender, traced in a delicate contour. He is broadshouldered, bigger, angular. They are close to each other. The painting's frame delimits and confines their shared space. There is the same amount of space as there is on the image. They have to fit in. Crouching, they cling to each other, even though they sometimes long to escape.
   Their hands and legs are already fleeing. They don 't escape. They are together, they are one, one shape, they form at times a double symbol. They are floating in a calm or tense balance. The lines of my figures are crossing the canvas. I wish that their contours indicate space, that the action on the picture be told by them alone.
   Despite used simplifications, they are rich in expression. Hands - at the beginning there is the palm, flexible, her fingers, wrist is positioned in many ways, after there is a stretched arm, it's line leading to the depth of the body. The hands are folded, close to the torso, supporting the head, enriching the figure's contour, or hands inside, disturbing the calmness of the body. The hands talk. Also the heads, legs reaching for each other or pushing each other away.
   The woman is less materialistic, I painted her smoothly. The man I painted with sand, earth. His torso becomes matte, deeper. It gains another dimension on the painting. Another way to differentiate.
   My figures are also in rooms. It is enough to mark four corners and there is already space for love or drama. The interior can be a wonderful meeting place or a cage without an exit, in which you have to stay together.
   While painting the series "The two of them", I shut myself with the figures in their world. During the work on canvas, there came an idea for another composition. Each painting was a seperate try to express what I didn 't show in the one before. Aside from the similarities in the painting techniques, Hived with my paintings and painted them separately.
   If my work transmits a certain meaning, that's good. I don't escape from signifance, although while painting this isn 't foremost in my mind.
   On the way to creation many "problems on the canvas" must be solved. The meaning is somewhere at the beginning, when I get the urge to create. The project is a sketch, and never defined completely. Anyway, the canvas and the oil paints have their own rules and I have to submit myself when I use them to express myself. I paint an image and I start to live with it like with a real being. It leads me somewhere, not vice versa. There are a lot of problems with the composition and the colors. When I think that it is finished, it tells about something, indepndently. I hope that this autonomous transmission is understood by the public. I wish for it to tell of being "in a couple" as much as possible.
   Is it possible to escape meaning while painting a man and a woman?
   
                                                                                                                                                       Jolanta Johnsson