LES ESSENTIELS D’ERIK ANDERSSON
I was honored to be chosen to contribute to Pascal’s labor of love. To celebrate my 60th birthday, I commissioned a still life of objects representing the people, places and things that comprise my life to date. It was good fun, and surprisingly challenging, to roam around my house seeking out items that would tell my story. I am finally finishing this up on my 62nd birthday. As they say, these things take time.
The artist is Portland, Oregon based Hickory Mertsching, whose work I’ve admired for many years.
From left to right:
I’m a classic film fan, and my favorite performer from the silent era is Harold Lloyd. He was the quintessential Everyman, and as it turns out, a favorite of my Farfar (my Swedish grandfather.) I have a couple Swedish movie posters from Harold Lloyd films and I like to think that my Farfar may have passed by one of them as he went to the cinema in 1920s Norrtälje, Sweden.
As a kid we’d drive down to Florida every year to give us a break from the New York winter. South of the Border is a basically a tourist trap and gas station, promoted on cheesy billboards from 200 miles in each direction. “Pedro says, ‘Chili today, hot tamale’” and “Turn around you meesed it” being the most memorable. But I think my love of road trips stems from those early years driving down Highway 301, before the Interstate existed.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman (or “Mountie”) represents my time at McGill University in Montreal. I met some of my most favorite people there and continued my immersion in music – lots of concerts, used record store sprees and even a time as a DJ on CFRM- Radio McGill.
The pelican is for my dear mother, who loved them and had quite a collection of the birds. This is one of the ones I kept for my own house as a little reminder of her.
I’ve had the great fortune of traveling back to Sweden with my Dad to reconnect with family there. I love the country, and so appreciate getting to experience it with my Dad. We visited Iceland during one of those trips, and I’m very happy I figured out how to get an Icelandic mustard bottle featuring dancing hot dogs into the painting.
Another nod to my Dad, my Swedish heritage and my love of music is the dalahäst or Dala horse, traditional hand-carved and pained folk art. This one is a special one, made to celebrate ABBA and purchased at the Stockholm museum dedicated to them. I also grew up in Saratoga Springs, NY, a city with a long history of horse racing.
What would a still life of my 60 years be without some favorite books. So many options to choose from! “The Four Million” by O. Henry is a collection of 25 short stories largely set in New York City exploring the lives of ordinary people. That was the time of the Gilded Age and the Four Hundred, a list of the 400 people worth knowing in New York Society. O. Henry countered that every New Yorker deserved attention and in fact there were four million worth knowing. I always loved that sentiment. The collection contains his most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi”.
Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer” is my favorite novel, a book that often feels like the author had access to my subconscious when he was putting pen to paper. A favorite passage: “The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
Kazuo Ishiguro is my favorite author, and I discovered him with this novel, released shortly after I graduated from college. “Remains of the Day” connected me to far away friends, and sent me to another time and place when I most needed the diversion of a great novel.
The last of the books is the autobiography of my favorite film director, Preston Sturges. For folks unfamiliar with him, he arguably had one of the finest runs of comedies in the 1940s, writing and directing stone cold comedy classics like THE LADY EVE, THE PALM BEACH STORY and his best known work, SULLIVAN’s TRAVELS. His biography reveals his life to be incredibly fascinating, as evidenced by the fact that his productive years in Hollywood make up a relatively minor number of the pages.
One birthday I took the day off and just roamed around my extended neighborhood at in Portland, Oregon. I stumbled across the toy car in an antique store and could not pass up the man and his dog on a road trip theme, something I had done often in real life. Turns out the dog was a dead ringer for my dog Ranger, the sweetest dog in the world that ironically became the Tasmanian Devil in a car.
The bottle of Berkshire Distillery Whiskey represents my family heritage on my mother’s side, from Western Massachusetts. The Berkshire Mountains are beautiful, especially in the fall when they turn all sorts of red, yellow and orange with the change of season.
Finally, Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger, representing my time as a student in Adelaide, South Australia. I so enjoyed my time there, so much to see, hear and experience. And lifetime friends too! I got to see the Split Enz “Enz of an Era” tour in Adelaide and Hunters and Collectors in a small nightclub in.
St. Kilda in Melbourne. One very long-lasting musical memory: While there, I read a review of the Blue Nile’s “A Walk Across the Rooftops” in the NME and it ended with the line “Great music is still being made.” I sought out the import at an Adelaide record store, brought it back to my place and put it on the stereo. I just stared at the speakers – the music had such a hold on me from the drop of the needle. I’d never heard anything like it. Still think of that little Adelaide apartment when I listen to the Blue Nile.
Erik Andersson
Juin 2026
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Mes Essentiels pour Stereographics par Erik Andersson
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