Tore Djupedal
Birth Date: 1950

Artist Gallery
Tore Djupedal was born in Norway and moved to the United States with his mother and siblings when he was four; his father was already there. Djupedal remembers going to the Empire State Building and wandering around the canyons of Manhattan holding his father’s hand. Djupedal grew up in Ohio but has lived in many places: Fort Lauderdale, Santa Fe, Chicago, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Miami. He has also spent time in Canada and Europe. Tore and his wife, Tanja, and their 15-month-old twin boys, Rembrandt and Romeo, were born in Portland, Oregon which the family now calls home. Djupedal has experimented with nearly all mediums in his artwork, though painting with oil is his medium of choice. Sculpturally, he has worked with clay, steel, stone, wood, blown, glass, bronze and discarded plastics. In two dimensions he has tried acrylic, watercolor, pencil, pen and ink, oil stick, gouache, pastels and house paint. As a child, Djupedal was always drawing or playing with Lincoln Logs, an Erector Set, Play-Doh and an Etch-a-Sketch. He attended a few art classes where he made animals and other objects with clay. He and his siblings received plenty of encouragement from their parents, always visiting museums on their yearly vacations. Eventually, all but Tore gravitated toward music. One sister is an opera singer and voice teacher, the other a pianist. His brother runs a museum in Norway, plays guitar and writes. Their father was an engineer. Tore said “He used to joke that he couldn’t think straight without a pencil in his hand. At the end of his career he designed both a new steel mill and a containerized shipping facility but was equally skilled with intimate projects. White we were young he showed us how to carve and work with wood, something he passed on to us form his own father, a master carver. The last thing he made was a lovely cherry wood dining room table”. Djupedal took only one art class in high school. Afterward he returned to Norway for a year and made a conscious decision to become an artist. He went to Ohio State University and earned his BFA. He taught for three years at the Canton Museum of Art, but found that it took so much time to be a competent teacher that there was none left for his own art, so he gave up teaching. Ever since I was a young man I wanted nothing else but to be an artist said Djupedal. “It seemed at that time like the finest kind of life. Creating objects of beauty and passion”.