Bigfork artist brushes up on Norwegian heritage

Alice Brosten spends hours experiencing Norwegian artistic heritage firsthand as she brushes colorful rosemaling along a huge beam in her home in Bigfork.

An active member with her husband Arne of the Sons of Norway, Brosten contributes to the local organization’s centennial celebration in 2012 by sharing the nation’s decorative painting tradition. She expanded her Nordic connection through marriage.

“I have a little Norwegian but Arne, his father was from Norway,” Brosten said. “He immigrated into the U.S. when he was a young man. His mother was quite a bit Norwegian, too.”

The Brostens now live in the Bigfork home built by Arne’s family with logs cut and milled off the 135 acres of surrounding land on Brosten Lane. She pointed to a log wall dividing the kitchen and living room from a large open great room where she stood.

“That wall used to be the end of the house,” Brosten said. “This was added on. Arne and I did that maybe five years ago. We’re still finishing it. I wanted to do an awful lot of things in it, so it takes longer.”

Rosemaling topped the list of things she wanted to do. In the original part of the house, Brosten had painted rosemaling plaques, and then affixed them to wood cornices over windows in her living room so future inhabitants could remove them if they had different tastes.

“Arne’s father and Arne built those cornices years and years and years ago, so they are kind of special for the family,” she said.

Brosten said Norwegians started the tradition of rosemaling in the early 1700s. Their motivation was to cheer up the interiors of their windowless houses in the depths of winter.

“Their houses were all kind of dreary and dark, so they decided to paint with rosemaling to decorate them. Some of them really went overboard,” she said with a laugh.

Opening a book, Brosten pointed to photos of rooms painted with scrolls, flowers, leaves and folk-style people and horses. Rosemaling covered nearly every surface, from walls to beams to entire ceilings and continued on benches, chairs, tables, stools and the very familiar trucks that many brought with them to America.

As with many fashions, the frenzy of rosemaling faded over time.

“It was nearly obsolete by the end of the 1800s,” Brosten said. “The reason it never completely died out is a few craftsmen up in the valleys continued the old traditions and handed pieces down through their families.”

Brosten learned about the history and the six main styles of rosemaling from “Norwegian Rosemaling: Decorative Painting on Wood” by artist Sigmund Aarseth and Margaret Miller.

“I read it cover to cover,” she said. “I thought it would be so much fun to see if I could do this.”

Using instructions from books and videos, Brosten started learning on her own, using Telemark-style scroll and flower patterns out of books to trace onto plaques with tracing paper and a stylus. She painted with acrylic primary colors.

Brosten soon switched from the quick-drying acrylic paint to the more forgiving oil paint originally used in rosemaling. She also began to search for a teacher for private lessons to perfect her strokes, learn to mix colors and pick up the many tricks that make the craft easier.

She found artist Pat Wallace, 83, through Sons of Norway.

“I thank my lucky stars I found Pat,” Brosten said. “She’s very Norwegian and a wonderful teacher. She’s just as spry and fun as she can be.”

A year ago in February, Brosten began spending Fridays rosemaling with Wallace in the kitchen of her home in Big Arm. She spends part of her week getting her wood plaque projects ready to take down to her lessons.

Brosten calls it her homework.

“If you take piano lessons, you have homework to do. If you don’t do your homework, you don’t learn very fast,” she said. “We just have a great time together.”

According to Wallace, Brosten’s request for lessons a year ago rekindled her interest in rosemaling. She started almost 10 years ago with lessons from an artist in Hamilton.

“I had never had a paintbrush in my hand in my life, and I was 75,” she said. “I guess my Norwegianism came out. There have been no other rosemaling artists in the family at all.”

Wallace later traveled to Decorah, Iowa, to take a workshop from Vesterheim Norwegian American Museum’s rosemaling artist Sara Tollefson.

“Generally I tend to do painting that is from the Valdres Valley of Norway,” Wallace said. “It is primarily flowers, stylized flowers.”

The artist said the most popular styles of rosemaling include Valdres, the familiar Telemark scrolls, Hollindahl and Rogaland. She described Rogaland as very symmetrical and Rogaland as having an oriental flair.

Wallace said people often confuse rosemaling with the folk art of tole painting.

“In tole painting, if you paint a daisy, it always looks like a daisy,” she said. “In rosemaling, it doesn’t necessarily in your interpretation.”

When Brosten called asking for lessons, Wallace had almost given up painting because she had so many pieces piling up. Sharing those Fridays together ignited her passion again.

“It’s not the usual teacher/student relationship.” she said. “About the only thing I did was tell her the strokes that you use, which are standard with rosemaling. She picked those up rather quickly.”

Wallace displays and sells her art in the Sandpiper Gallery, 306 Main St., Polson. People can view her work from plates to a rosemaled duck on the gallery’s website, www.sandpiperartgallery.com.

“I usually have three or four pieces down there and change them out periodically,” she said.

Wallace was amazed when Brosten told her she intended to put rosemaling along the large beam in her house. Wallace said she would never attempt such a large project.

Occasionally, Brosten wonders the same thing, after hours sitting on the scaffolding with her arms outstretched overhead.

“After I paint a couple of hours, I’m having trouble getting my arms back down,” she said with her infectious laugh. “It’s kind of hard.”

No stranger to hard work, Brosten, her husband and his father ran a dairy and a raw milk cheese plant called Brosten’s Cheese for a decade. She and Arne also raised two boys, Mark now in Missoula and Troy in Salt Lake City.

Since retiring, Brosten said she finds herself busier than ever with Sons of Norway, Bethany Lutheran Church and family, now including Troy’s 4-year-old daughter Ashley Rose. Her craft endeavors started with Hardanger Norwegian embroidery than branched into rosemaling.

Their home addition created a craft room and a painting studio with north light. Brosten said she usually limits painting to daytime hours and no more than three to four hours at a time.

“If you get tired, you get careless, so you had better be quitting while you’re still doing a decent job,” she said.

When she finishes her monumental beam rosemaling, Brosten looks forward to decorating trunks, benches and other projects including a stool and large wood plates she ordered from the Vesterheim museum. She also has orders from family members.

“Right now, I have projects for years,” she  said.

For other people interested in learning rosemaling, Brosten said they can learn from a book but need a teacher to improve. Wallace isn’t taking on more students but might teach a workshop if people contact her at patkw@cyberport.net.