Helene Lundbye Petersen on Love Beyond Definition
by Maria Belton
In a world saturated with images, information and noise, Danish artist and philosopher Helene Lundbye Petersen has built an entire artistic universe around connection, presence, and colour. Her life’s work, /WhitePageProject, began with a single gesture : the offering of a blank white page — and has since evolved into a living, breathing artwork that weaves together philosophy, performance, writing, and painting. At its core lies a call to return to what she names the Genuine: the raw, unfiltered resonance between self, other, and existence itself. Through her Colour Spectrum of Genuine Being, each hue becomes a space of emotion and insight — an experience to enter rather than a concept to grasp.
The Green Space
Each Colour Space in the Spectrum holds its own state of being. After White, Blue, Orange and Red comes Green. Can you describe what this Space is about?
Oh, Green.
Green is very opposite of Red. It is generous, gentile, light, and healthy. It is life and growth. It holds hope and carries a strength that is not based on muscle, force, or seduction, but a natural state of flow. To be held and hold. To dance with life. Some would say it is the only true feeling that exist, and that all other feelings are mere distortions of it. It is where we are all connected. We are one, but not the same, crossing over and held together by the invisible bonds that binds us.
The understanding of the Green Space comes from The Green Book - Ode to Love that you published in 2016 ?
Yes, It is the book of love, about a Goddess of Love whose realm is the invisible threads that connect us to life and to each other. She has always existed as a mere potential, but as she is confronted with Wisdom (the Blue Book), she is forced to see the consequences of our lack of genuine understanding, love. She sees that we are suffering, not because love is absent, but because we want to control it, own it, and we misuse it.
She then decides to take responsibility for love and teach us what she has seen. Because love cannot be defined; it can be lived and felt. The moment we define it, we also cut the bond to her, and we can't cut her, and shape her. Because She’s everything, basically. She is all of us, the way that we genuinely are and genuinely love.
And as our guardian, she teaches through the patterns of love that she has observed across all ages, across time and space with the hope that it will inspire us to love. Green holds that state of trust, where we can be without defintion, without control, and allow ourselves to feel life genuinely.
How did you experience Green when you began painting it?
Green as a colour is often associated with nature or sometimes with the sea, and it carries such richness of nuances. When finding the shade of the Colour Spaces, I always return to the shades of the original calligraphic manuscripts. Here the green was light pastel, almost indecisive, undefinable - just like love.
Green itself is also a difficult colour. It is a mixed pigment that changes its shades, but it also carries something very alive. Various pigments were used to find it that ocean toned, pastel mint, moss-like kind of shade. It was a joy to paint.
And during that time, something personal unfolded. While I was painting Green, I ran into my now husband — someone I had known from the past. By coincidence, we crossed paths on the street during a simple stroll, and that encounter sparked something. A few weeks later he asked if we should be together. So the experience of painting Green is forever intertwined with that crossing in my own life.
When I created these paintings, it was the first time I let the canvases merge together. When I painted them, I followed the line from one canvas into the other, and back again. They are now one painting, but in two parts, connected, even if you separate them, they will always belong together. They mirror each other without becoming one and the same. Connected, and intertwined.
When you look at your paintings, and prints, you can tell when the two are next to each other that they cross, or belong to one another. How did that translate into the paintings’ imagery?
It's like this: you are an entity, alone. But in the moment that you feel that you are not alone, because you see yourself in another person and the other person in you. The moment that you can contain another, you transcend that border and become a part of a whole. There is something that merges without you losing yourself. You just you feel whole together.
That became the foundation of the two paintings. I created two canvases drawn into one another. Along the sides, I extended the line three-dimensionally, painting from one canvas and finishing on the other, so they are always connected — though never one single surface. Always intertwined. Along the sides, I extended the lines three-dimensionally. I basically painted it from one painting, finishing on the other, so that they are always connected.
Photo by Morten Eggert at The Danish Parliament Christiansborg, Copenhagen
But do you see this only as a personal or intimate love between two?
No, I see it as Love itself.
Of course, because of my experience while painting Green, I cannot help but think of that meeting that changed my personal life. But this crossing can take place in all kinds of love.
The lines can draw spheres, membranes, or bonds. They can be endlessly small, and exceed and expand infinitely. They are in constant movement. They are the invisible threads that connect us all. When they cross, that is where we we feel as one—where something in us belongs to the other, and something in the other belongs to us.
How do you, or your Green Book, explain the different kinds of Love ?
In our current world, we just operate with love in sometimes commercial, and often limited terms, frequently associated with the colour red—which in my Colour Spectrum represents Battle and the Will which is Passion, yes, but not love itself. Love can be passionate, but that is only a mere fragment of its force.
The Ancient Greeks used various words for love: Eros was the romantic passion; Philia as friendship; Agape and the selfless, unconditional love, Storge as the familial love; Ludus as the playful or flirtatious love; Pragma as the committed enduring love; and Philautia as the self love. These distinctions are so very important, to expand our view on love away from the romantic unbalance, but also at the risk of booming theoretical. Instead I propose we use only one word, but open ourselves its undefinable nature.
Through Green, the Goddess of Love embodies them all. She resists definition, because definition limits her capacity to unite through feeling. Yet when she sees our suffering, she turns to the patterns of love that she has seen to grasp the unspoken bonds that connect us all. In the book, she draws these patterns for us: like the love of something beginning, the love between people, the love for the entirety. She draws them in the hope that we may recognise them, remember them, and open ourselves to love.
It is ephemeral. Very hard to portray, because they can take as many forms and shapes as us. And change, as we change.
There is a visual in the book where two circles cross over.
I think that's actually the portrait of love. Where Green holds that state of trust, where we can exist without rigid definition, without control, and allow ourselves to feel life genuinely.
So Red is very powerful, but it is actually Green that is the true force of life ?
Yes.
Red can never be what unite us, only love can.
To read more about the Green Space, dive into her exhibition here: The Green Space
Find the Green Print that calls to you:
