The hilarious, tragic and extraordinary being of artist Sara-Vide Ericson

Sara-Vide Ericson is prone to overshare. Even the simplest question catapults the artist into a series of unexpected anecdotes. For instance, when I ask her how she likes living in the countryside in Hälsingland, three hours north of Stockholm, she begins by saying she loves it, but then... “People think I’m a country bumpkin, but I grew up in Stockholm, too.

I was caught shoplifting in my early teens, nothing major of course, and rapidly I turned into a bit of a problem child, so my mother shipped me off to the countryside ... Classic story. When I moved back to Stockholm and started art school, I realised like 80 per cent of everyone attending the Royal Institute of Art came from a similar background, which was pretty depressing for obvious reasons.” I agree with her, and suddenly we’re discussing the lack of diversity in arts academia.

After the slight detour, Ericson returns to the shoplifting incident. “I stole an eyeliner and got caught. I mean, I must have been the worst shoplifter ever. Who steals an eyeliner and can’t manage to smuggle it into your bag?” She heads off on another tangent. “Of course you can get into trouble in the countryside as well.

I bought [the illicit homemade spirit] poteen from this shepherd. I remember walking up to him on Bollnästorget, he was in this long leather heavy metal-type jacket, and whispered, ‘I hear you sell poteen’. He just took out his tiny little snake from his huge leather coat and it peed on me. It was the most insane thing ever. Totally gross.”

As in conversation, Ericson has a unique way of telling stories with her paintings. The artist’s visual language emotes a dream-like state, based on her rural surroundings. The scenes she paints are meticulously staged and directed by the artist, static in time – resting, waiting, often baiting the viewer to imagine what happened right before or immediately after the moment depicted.

Occasionally, she uses herself as muse, including her own image in her paintings. Her rustic interiors and expansive landscapes, bathed in natural light, are infused with a certain Nordic noir. The scenes Ericson portrays in her work echo the pastoral backdrop she’s had most her life. When she was very young, her mother bought a farm in Hälsingland. “My mother and I have a terrible, dysfunctional relationship,” Ericson says. “Currently she’s very sick with cancer. After spending a large part of my life wishing that she would cease to exist, I’m conflicted now that she’s unwell.”

Her relationship with her father is similarly strained. “I remember calling my father, who lived in Skåne when I was a teenager,” she says. “In one instance, I was threatening to cut my wrists, and in the next begging him to let me move down south. He nervously replied that he needed to check, but suggested I maybe go live at Lundsberg [a boarding school in Värmland, Sweden]. I needed to live with an adult that cared.” She recalls these tragic moments with an air of amusement.

Ericson’s mother is a photographer and writer with “aspirations of becoming an artist.” Ericson is convinced that on some subliminal level, her mother willed her into becoming an artist. “I was made to paint – it is part of who I am. And, almost selfishly, it is what I think about constantly, but I’m not sure I had a say in becoming this way, or if my mother somehow predetermined my being,” she says.

“It’s with a certain amount of sorrow I’ve come to understand this, having to accept that I’m not the sum of my own choices.” She describes these insights as “part of her journey towards an early midlife crisis.” Ericson recalls being objectified by her mother from an early age – dressed up and photographed, used in books, commercials and campaigns, often surrounded by nature. In an almost Freudian twist, it is these surroundings – the nature and woodland – that are extensively featured throughout her own paintings.

Memory serves as an important component in Ericson’s practice, despite – or perhaps due to – the fact that she recalls “very little” from her own childhood. She does remember one thing quite vividly. “I have this very clear recollection of eating clothes,” she says. “When my mother and father were divorcing, as revenge my mother took his credit card and flew to Paris and bought enormous amounts of expensive designer clothes, couture even, burning through his savings. She bought busloads of clothes from Kenzo and Louis Vuitton.

When we relocated to Hälsingland, she drove all the clothes up there, and housed them in a barn.” Ericson’s mother later sold the clothes to ladies in the village for next to nothing. “My stepfather told me that for years you could see all these ladies in the village and the neighbouring area walking around in Kenzo sweater sets and other fancy wear.” Her earliest memory is walking through rows and rows of clothes that filled the barn, chewing on sequin dresses and eating wool coats.

Ericson’s journey back to her roots took time. After graduating from art school, she lived in China on a residency program for six months and painted . When she came back to Stockholm, she had her first solo exhibition with the famed Galleri Magnus Karlsson, a starting ground for internationally famous Swedish artists such as Karin Mamma Andersson, Jockum Nordström and Jens Fänge. “All the paintings I had made for that show were sold, and I bought my first house, in Uppsala,” she says.

Still, she wasn’t ready to return to Hälsingland. “The idea of moving up there, close to my mother, irked me. During that time, I partied all night, and then would sober up around 8am and start painting. Admittedly a lot of what I was working on then wasn’t very good.” Looking back Ericson admits she was depressed, spending her days painting “terrible onions and leeks” wearing a strange pink onesie she had bought in China.

The process was painful but therapeutic. Eventually, all the illusions regarding who she was as a person, as well as an artist, dissipated, and Ericson became completely intuitive in her work. “Suddenly I started dreaming in images I needed to paint,” she says. “Now I stage and bring memories to life through my work; whether they’re mine or not is irrelevant, I’m creating them while painting.”

By growing up in what Ericson describes as an utterly chaotic milieu, painting became her refuge early on. Obsessed with archaeology and Egyptology, the artist would spend hours copying famous paintings and photographs. When she discovered oil paints, a whole new visual language opened up to her. “Oil paint was the key to everything,” she says. “The paintings I painted when I was younger weren’t great, but to me they were like meat and oil paint became my knife and fork.” Though the subject matter has changed, she still uses oil paint today.

Inspired by Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, in which the author describes writing for his wife, Ericson paints for her partner, Christian. A fellow artist, he can be brutal sometimes, telling Ericson to take a break if she isn’t present in her work. “Christian is the centre of my onion, of people I let into my process, and then as the layers go on, I include more people and their opinions,” Ericson says. She and Christian share a daughter. She describes their harmonious countryside existence, the “safe space” she’s worked so hard to create, as free from outside influence and opinions. “Sometimes through social media, I find myself comparing my work with some painter in Los Angeles. Here, my friends and neighbours don’t care about that,” she says.

Lately horse backriding has become increasingly important to her – a respite from preparations for her upcoming solo show at Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. “Riding has become one of my great passions. I know it’s cliché, but it’s so good to focus on something completely out of my element, far from studio life,” she says, noting that owning horses is a “black hole for your finances.” In typical Ericson fashion, this parlays into a conversation about consumption (“I absolutely love shopping for my horse”) eventually landing on an enthusiastic debate about classic cars, specifically, Isuzu Troopers from the mid-1980s.

There are no bounds to Ericson’s knowledge of random topics. She isn’t scared of a big expression, in her work or her life. Much like the nature and characters she depicts, her paintings are bombastic. Large brush strokes encompass a myriad of emotions, pointing to her deep well of experience – experiences she’s more than happy to share if you only ask. Oh, and for the record, despite the incident with the snake, Ericson inevitably bought the poteen. “Of course,” she says. “I was on a mission.”