Summer Grey of Reykjavik Painting

As honest as possible, with all wits and senses, with body and soul, layer by layer from the primal ground on towards a surprising imagery off the beaten tracks. My foundations as an artist were laid during my era as a city draftsman. Wandering through urban environments with a focus on the often overlooked, the hidden places, I collected data in the form of pencil studies and notes on paper but also as memories and engravings in kinesthetic physicality. Processing this field research in the studio created my way of working, its pictorial repertoire and the expressive gesture to start with. The physical wandering of the beginnings has been expanded to an artistic drift, touching new subject matters such as a phenomenological approach to anatomy, a long-time outdoor research on the relations between nature and human, the visuality of music at midnight, the expressiveness and storytelling of dance … As drifting goes, I take the liberty of touching new fields and concepts – but also the freedom of leaving them for new adventures (to return whenever I like). As every challenge has its specific character I grow on meeting them with a variety of materials, media, and style: pencil and watercolor studies, often in form of comprehensive series, whose minimalist intuitions pioneered a fine, unobtrusive side line for painting; large drawings in chalk and gouache on paper, that with their often rustic semi-figurative approach reveal my Weißensee academy of art roots; panel-paintings of different sizes in oil on wood (with their acrylic descendants) – the center of my doing, dancing out all that has been prepared; the aftermath of small mixed-media artwork on paper that uses cutting as a last step of composition. Physicality, intuition, concepts and gestures these days lead to a rich and more non-figurative way of expression. But, as it was from the beginning, it is still and for all time my greatest goal to transmit Lebenswelt, lifeworld, into a visual universe of painting and balance its elements in their new resort to make them resound.