“Every day since, I get the answer: This was the right decision. I feel whole here.”
Anchored by Ice and Ink: A Journey from Oslo to the Edge of the World
Robert Selfors is a multidisciplinary creative force—part artist, part communicator, and entirely captivated by the act of making. Spanning roles as a designer, photographer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and brand strategist, his professional experience weaves through the corridors of Norway’s capital, Oslo, where for three decades he carved out a decorated career in visual communication. Educated extensively in the aesthetics of design and graphic expression, Selfors earned accolades for his contributions to photography, design innovation, and entrepreneurship. Yet, despite the recognition, his truest calling took shape far from the polished urban skyline and closer to the untouched Arctic wilderness of his youth.
In 2019, Selfors made a defining choice: he left Oslo behind and returned to the northern reaches of Norway. This was not a whim but a visceral homecoming, guided by a gut-deep sensation that the rhythms of urban life no longer aligned with who he was. Each return from travel abroad only underscored the dissonance—his body resisting the cityscape in favor of the sweeping, silent terrain he once roamed as a boy. Back in the Arctic, he found not only peace but an endless stream of inspiration embedded in the snowfields, icy rivers, and sunless skies. That deep connection to place—unfiltered and urgent—feeds the soul of his art, making every brushstroke a dialogue with nature.
Creativity, for Selfors, is both instinct and inheritance. Even before he had language for it, art was a refuge and a revelation. Struggling with dyslexia during his childhood, the classroom became an emotional gauntlet. Reading aloud felt like an exposure of inadequacy. Yet, drawing offered a way to communicate that transcended words, and empathetic teachers recognized the spark in his sketches. Those early affirmations grounded his confidence. Now, as a mature artist living in what he calls his “paradise,” Selfors explores the Arctic with the same wonder he held as a child. Each artistic venture is less a performance and more a conversation between memory, place, and a sense of returning to one’s truest self.
Robert Selfors: Between Landscape and Imagination
Rather than positioning his work within a strict genre or movement, Selfors gravitates toward the interplay between representation and abstraction. His pieces hover at the intersection of the recognizable and the intuitive, often capturing the mood of a moment rather than its literal form. This stylistic liminality—hovering between the seen and the felt—allows him to construct a distinctive visual language, one that refuses to box in interpretation. Titles are rarely assigned to his artworks; instead, he invites viewers to bring their own stories and emotions to the canvas, encouraging a highly personal engagement with each piece.
The Arctic landscape serves as both subject and co-author in Selfors’s practice. Whether through painting, drawing, or mixed-media compositions, his works channel the overwhelming scale, texture, and light of the far north. He does not replicate the terrain; rather, he translates its essence. The midnight sun, frozen riverbanks, and biting wind—these are not just features of a place, but emotive forces that shape the contours of his artistic response. With camera in hand or canvas before him, Selfors moves fluidly across disciplines, using each medium to extract something different from the wilderness. His workspace could just as easily be a tent in the snow as a studio indoors, provided the Arctic light is present to ignite his intuition.
Despite his respect for technique, Selfors resists becoming anchored to one material or method. Acrylic and oil paints offer varied possibilities, each suited to different moments of expression. In mixed-media pieces, he fuses elements from photography, sketching, and painting to evoke layered experiences. This cross-pollination of disciplines reflects his desire to keep curiosity alive—to never let the childlike impulse to explore be dulled by routine. During his education, he became familiar with transfer methods and graphic techniques that continue to influence his visual language. Each medium he engages with becomes a tool for unearthing emotion, exploring ideas, and staying grounded in the continuous act of discovery.
Art That Breathes with the Earth
The natural world is more than an influence in Robert Selfors’s work—it is a collaborator, a teacher, and a muse. He speaks of nature with reverence, describing it as a masterful artist that offers gifts without demand. The Arctic, in particular, is a vast canvas of contrasts, where isolation meets clarity, and stillness hums with power. Selfors doesn’t strive to imitate this beauty; instead, he seeks to channel the quiet majesty that he experiences while moving through snow-covered valleys or watching the play of polar light. Nature offers endless textures, sounds, and shapes that inform his intuition, steering his hand in ways that no artificial reference could.
Selfors is wary of distractions, especially when they come in the form of photography so beautiful it traps him in replication. A stunning image might paralyze the imagination, anchoring him too closely to the visible and preventing the spontaneous flow he values. To return to creative freedom, he removes such influences from sight, allowing space for instinct to guide him. This self-imposed distance from the literal frees him to compose images that are emotionally authentic rather than optically accurate. In this open-ended process, intuition plays the starring role, and nature provides the script.
His reverence for Mother Earth doesn’t stop at admiration—it informs his current artistic ambitions. One of his developing projects, titled Monuments, centers on the escalating global crisis of climate change. Still in progress, this series seeks to grapple with the fragility and transience of the environment, framing it not as a distant issue but a shared human concern. For Selfors, art is the freest language to express emotional responses to the pressing questions of our time. Through Monuments, he aims to offer a contemplative space for viewers to consider what is vanishing, and what might still be preserved, if we listen to the signals the planet is sending.
Robert Selfors: The Voice Behind the Silence
Selfors finds deep kinship with artists who are able to externalize their inner turmoil and emotional landscapes with raw honesty. He holds a particular admiration for Edvard Munch, whose work he believes captures the invisible tensions of the human psyche with astonishing power. This ability to translate emotion into visual form—without dilution or disguise—is something Selfors strives for in his own work. He’s also attuned to the many underrecognized artists, particularly women, who offer potent and expressive perspectives yet often remain unseen within broader art conversations. He sees emotional expression in art not just as a personal act, but as a communal one—connecting individuals through shared vulnerabilities.
One of Selfors’s core beliefs is that emotional honesty and environmental sensitivity are not separate threads—they are interwoven. His upbringing, marked by both the struggles of dyslexia and the sanctuary of the natural world, taught him that silence holds its own kind of voice. In his work, this translates into pieces that feel both intimate and expansive, inviting viewers to listen as much as to look. Each artwork becomes a space where personal stories and universal emotions intersect, shaped by the magnetic pull of the Arctic and the layered voice of an artist who has found his ground.
For all his success and seasoned perspective, Selfors remains rooted in a mindset of wonder and exploration. He doesn’t seek mastery so much as evolution. Whether experimenting with materials or conceptualizing new bodies of work, he sees each project as part of an ongoing conversation—with the land, with the self, and with those who encounter his art. At www.arcticmoods.org, followers can trace this journey, one brushstroke at a time, as he continues to build a body of work shaped not by expectation, but by elemental truth.
Now Selfors is awaiting calls from curators and art galleries to initiate a win-win cooperation.
