Bob Landström’s paintings are interesting not only for their chosen subjects, dense with allusions and symbols but also for the materials he chooses to work with. Using a unique medium of crushed volcanic rocks, he has developed numerous techniques for coloring rocks, allowing him to produce an expansive, highly cohesive series of paintings marked by a distinctive style.
Describing himself as “a student of metaphysics”, Landström is interested in glyphs and symbols from ancient cultures and how these marks have traveled through civilizations, geographies and time. This also fits his chosen materials, with his artistic process not unlike that of alchemy—transforming emotions and ideas into artifacts through volcanic rock.
“I think every person is a kind of transceiver to varying degrees, depending on where they’re from and how they live,” writes Landström on his website, “which is reflected in the fact—among other ways—that certain images or symbols are universal and occur in vastly different civilizations all over the world and throughout history.”
His paintings provide an assembled constellation of recurring imagery, including animals, letters/word fragments, diagrams, symbols, and glyphs. These elements in combination — with letters sometimes arranged to suggest headlines or titles, and symbols presented as formulas, swirling around realistically rendered creatures — form their own pictorial universe.
He describes is as a sort of mash-up of symbols with other languages, formulas, and spirit animals that emerges from this babbling brook of consciousness in his head and takes up their life on the canvas. Take a look at some of his undeciphered work in the gallery below:
