Spring in Iceland arrives slowly and then all at once. For weeks the light is tentative, the days stretching a few minutes longer each morning without quite committing. Then, suddenly, it is summer light — long and almost horizontal in the evenings, the kind that makes everything cast a shadow twice its height. I look forward to it every year, and every year it still surprises me.
In the studio this spring I have been following a pull I have felt for some time: to go deeper into botanical form. Not toward illustration — the work is and will remain abstract — but toward a more sustained looking at plants before the painting begins. The question is what happens to the abstraction when the observation underneath it is more thorough.
Looking more closely
There is a difference between abstracting from a general impression of a plant and abstracting from genuine study of it. In the first case you paint what you already know — a leaf shape, a flower silhouette, something familiar. In the second, you start to notice things you had not seen before: the exact way a petal curves at its edge, the particular weight of a stem, the way roots spread not randomly but with an internal logic. That knowledge changes what the brush does, even when the result looks nothing like the plant itself.
This spring I have been spending more time with plants before I paint them — drawing, looking, sitting with them. The paintings that have come out of that process feel different. More specific, somehow. The abstraction has more conviction because it knows what it is abstracting from.
Form and feeling
What interests me about botanical form is that it sits at the edge between structure and flow. A plant follows rules — growth patterns, symmetries, the logic of light-seeking — and yet it is never rigid. That tension between order and organic movement is exactly what I am trying to work with in paint. Colour and mark that feel alive, not arbitrary.
Colour and light this spring
The palette has moved toward something cooler than last year — more grey-green, muted blue. Perhaps a response to the warmth of 2025, or perhaps just what the paintings are asking for. Against the quieter colour, the botanical forms seem to carry more weight.
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