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'The Scream' appears in a tree stump

The Local Norway
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'The Scream' appears in a tree stump
The Scream by Edvard Munch appears in a tree stump. Photo: Kjell Marius Mathisen

“I felt as though a vast, endless scream passed through nature,” painter Edvard Munch famously wrote. But he didn't mean it quite as literally as this.

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"I was just having a walk along the river here, and I just happened to stumble over this stump," Kjell Marius Mathisen, who works with cultural heritage for Oppland county council, told The Local. "It was kind of fun, so I just took a picture and shared it with my friends." 

Despite Munch's poem, Mathisen said he believed the appearance of a near perfect replica of the famous painting 'The Scream'  in nature was "just a coincidence".
 
He said he had nonetheless been surprised at how many other people saw Munch's motif in the tree's rings. 
 
"It is very funny that so many different people around the world see the same thing in the stump," he told Norway's NRK network. "Often there are different interpretations of such things, but here everyone's unanimous." 
 
The Munch Museum posted the picture on its Facebook page, and the picture has already gained 7900 likes. 
 
"This is the most famous and recognisable piece of art probably in the world, so there's a lot of people who recognise the motif," Mathisen told The Local. 
 
"This could be the new attraction in Lillehammer, so we should consider a campaign to protect the stump and mount a tourist campaign," he told NRK, his tongue firmly in his cheek. 
 

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