Lill-Marie Blomberg-Rolf was an artist and visual therapist, known above all for her landscape painting.
Lill-Marie Blomberg-Rolf was born in Stockholm in 1923. She was the daughter of the sculptor Marie Louise Idestam-Blomberg and the author Erik Blomberg. She studied first at Anders Beckmans Skola (nowadays Beckmans College of Design) in Stockholm and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, after which she studied at the Royal Institute of Art (Kungliga Konsthögskolan, KKH) in Stockholm. In 1951, she married the artist Lars Rolf. The two were married until 1960 and had one son, Richard Rolf, who became a musician and instrument-maker.
During her lifetime, Lill-Marie Blomberg-Rolf exhibited her work at Galerie Blanche and Galleri H in Stockholm, among other places. She participated in the exhibition of Swedish painters Svenska målare at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1985. Her art is currently represented at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.
Her creativity resulted in drawings and paintings. Nature played a vital role for her, and she identified herself with it and saw human beings as a part of it. Art and nature went hand in hand. Her motifs were often taken from an island in Bohuslän on the Swedish west coast where she spent a great deal of her time. She often painted landscapes with shores and rocky terrain, and also drew the countryside in greyscale.
She was also very interested in human beings and experienced it as a conflict that she needed to be alone to be able to work. She saw at the same time her work as a strong power to attain liberation and mental health, and thus trained as a visual therapist. The need for visual therapy probably had its roots in her own experience of alienation. She wrote at one point: “in the newspaper it says that naivety, intimacy, closeness and subjectivity are no longer possible in art” and put the rhetorical question: “what is possible in that case for someone like me?” Even when she had been struck by illness, she continued to draw and lived in her world of images.
Lill-Marie Blomberg-Rolf died in 1992. She is buried in Sigtuna Cemetery.
