Kristin Kjorlaug is a decorative art painter in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania with an intergenerational art education in Norwegian Rosemaling, gained at the side of her Norwegian grandmother who trained in the art of Rosemaling at the Vesterheim Museum Folk Art school. With a passion for her roots in Norway (and Sweden), Kristin continues to embellish and expand the decorative art strokes she learned from her grandmother.
Kristin Kjorlaug’s story
Kristin Kjorlaug was my dear Norwegian Grandmother’s artist name and it’s the name that I paint under now in her memory and to honor the years she spent teaching me her craft. The name Kjørlaug was brought from Norway to America in 1884 by my great great grandfather. My grandmother held on to Norwegian traditions tightly, her greatest delight being the study and painting of Norwegian Rosemaling through local teachers in Minnesota and at the Vesterheim Museum Folk Art School in Iowa. She was an entrepenuer who turned her decorative art into a brass ornament business, chemically etching her designs in tanks designed and built by my grandfather. They ran this business together from 1972-1987 and I still sell the brass ornaments they created.
What is Rosemaling?
At it’s height in the Baroque and Rococo era, Norwegian Rosemaling was a meandering, flexible decorative art being painted on the walls, doors, and ceilings of the farms, and family rooms of everyday Norwegian farmers who had been on their land for generations — poor but proud owners of property. Rosemaling represents to me creativity in poverty, and the art pieces I choose are chunks of that painted barn, slivers of cultivation, and real names of humans in my Kjørlaug family tree who made a way for me to be present — creating.
