People sometimes assume they know where an artist finds inspiration.
If they see mountains in a photograph, they expect mountains on the canvas. If they discover forests, lakes or waterfalls, they imagine that the next painting will become a landscape painting.
That has never been true for me.
In fact, some of the places that have shaped me the most will probably never appear in any of my paintings.
Yet without them, many of those paintings might never have existed.
It Started With a Camera
Many years ago, before oil paints, before acrylics, and long before my work became what it is today, I spent countless hours walking through the Nordic wilderness with a camera over my shoulder.
At the time I was deeply interested in photography. Around the same period I had also begun creating digital illustrations, many of them inspired by Scandinavian folklore, forgotten legends and the mysterious atmosphere of the northern landscape.
The camera had a practical purpose. I photographed textures, old trees, rivers, waterfalls and dramatic light because I wanted reference material for my illustrations.
Or at least, that was what I believed I was doing.
Looking back, I realise something entirely different was happening.
Learning to See Instead of Looking
Photography taught me something that no software ever could.
It slowed me down.
When you carry a camera, you begin to notice things that most people simply walk past. The colour hidden inside weathered stone. The patterns in old tree bark. The way mist softens an entire valley. The shifting light that transforms the same place from one hour to the next.
But what stayed with me was never just what I saw.
It was the smell of rain settling into the moss after a summer shower.
The cold air drifting across open mountain plateaus.
The constant sound of moving water somewhere beyond the trees.
The silence that never really feels silent once you stop and listen.
Without realising it, I was training something far more important than my ability to compose a photograph.
I was learning how to observe.
A landscape that inspires my art, even if you may never see it in my paintings.
– Andy Renard
When Inspiration Changes Shape
Years passed.
My digital illustrations gradually gave way to acrylic painting, and eventually to oil painting. The tools changed. My techniques changed. Even the subjects I chose to paint changed.
What never changed was where many of the ideas began.
People occasionally ask whether the Nordic mountains appear in my paintings.
The honest answer is no.
I rarely paint mountains.
I rarely paint forests.
I rarely paint waterfalls.
If you look through my work, you will find portraits, symbolism, memories, emotion and imagination—but very little that resembles the places where so much of the inspiration was born.
That is because landscapes do not inspire me through their appearance.
They inspire me through their atmosphere.
The Things That Cannot Be Photographed
Some experiences refuse to fit inside a camera.
You cannot photograph the feeling of standing completely alone beside an ancient river.
You cannot photograph the scent carried by cold mountain air.
You cannot photograph the strange calm that appears when there is nothing to hear except the wind moving through distant trees.
Those experiences become something else.
They influence colour choices without announcing themselves.
They shape composition without asking permission.
They create moods that quietly find their way into a painting, even when the finished work bears no resemblance to the place where the idea first appeared.
By the time inspiration reaches the canvas, the landscape itself has disappeared.
Only the feeling remains.
Returning Years Later
This summer I find myself returning to many of those same places.
The rivers still follow the same ancient paths.
The forests remain patient.
The mountains continue exactly as they always have, indifferent to the passing of time.
Standing there again feels strangely familiar.
Not because I expect to recreate old photographs or revisit old digital illustrations.
But because I recognise the person who first came here looking for inspiration.
Only now I understand what I was really searching for.
The Landscapes Between the Paintings
When people look at my work, they may never know where an idea first began.
They will not see the waterfall hidden beyond the trees.
They will not hear the stream that echoed through an empty valley.
They will not smell the damp moss after rain or feel the wind crossing an open mountain ridge.
And that is exactly as it should be.
Art does not always record a place.
Sometimes it records what that place quietly changed inside the artist.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning.
Not to paint the landscape itself, but to experience it once more—to fill the mind with colours, sounds, silence and emotions that will one day emerge in unexpected ways.
The mountains may never appear on my canvas.
But they are there all the same.