The artist Olle Nyman
 

Olle Nyman was born on Christmas Eve 1909 in the Övre gården in Saltsjö-Duvnäs where today the Nedre gården, for many years his and his sister Kajsa's home, as well as the studios built by Olle Nyman are the foundation that bears his and his sister's name. He himself has testified to the importance of the building's with their fine proportions and the buildings' relationship to each other for his view of images. Getting art to collaborate with architecture would also be one of his major tasks as an artist. He collaborated with a number of the most significant architects in the middle of the last century.

It was also in the building-related art that he came to perform his significant teaching work at the Academy of Fine Arts as the leader of the so-called Monumental School. There he shared his great knowledge of materials, his deep knowledge of classical form-building, his playfulness and his familiarity with modernism.

In the middle of the last century, some of his generational comrades gathered out on the farm in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Evert Lundquist also lived there for a while. Among the others were Roland Kempe and Torsten Renqvist. He had a unique ability to, with a light hand, build compositions that at once expressed firmness and had a light rhythm. With a subdued and earthy color scale, he built up his still lifes, landscapes and figures with a tactile tangibility. However, his touch with the earth tones did not prevent him from making a painting sparkle with a happy, impressionistic light.

A special chapter in his art is the sculptures he made of stone pieces, potsherds and porcelain crushers, all joined together with cement. His ability to observe celebrates triumphs when, in these reluctant materials, he captures the character of both animals and humans. In this way he performed all the "Commedia dell'artes" characters in which he, with the greatest precision, dots their vanity, servility, jealousy and chain. Olle Nyman's greatness as an artist was that he, in all situations, reached life and nature without sacrificing the discipline that he considered the artistic work required of him.

Olle Granath