Three things motivate and shape my work: pure pleasure, challenge, and the engagement in a visual and critical dialogue with other painters, past and present. The pure pleasure I derive from painting is just that: complete and utter expressive gratification, akin to faith in its steadfastness. The challenge comes in many forms, particularly in not knowing exactly where a work is going to go.

I still consider myself a painter and find it difficult not to refer to these embroidered portraits as “paintings.” Although the medium employed is crewel embroidery wool, the technique borrows from the worlds of both drawing and painting.

I am interested in how place is constructed and how the automobile mediates private and public space. The built environment that surrounds the autmobile plays a large role in my work; it is an example of the complex set of meanings that are attached to the landscape. Physical places exist in the mind as memory, history, identity, and myth. By existing in this way, these places get transformed into something other than what they are in their physical form.

The ways in which architecture varies has ultimately found a place of direct influence within my work, their alterations spawning my own re-configurations. In my most recent work, I play with the idea of how I can re-assemble the architecture I experience by creating my own configurations, my own architectural hybrids. These new configurations transcribe representational elements of actual space while also incorporating abstraction of the formal elements of flat paint and drawing over a wood veneer surface.

Divining by Ephemera (Shoddy Stagecraft) My work mimics the psychosis surrounding crystallomancy and the performance of fortunetelling in the gypsy wagon. Like divining by crystal balls, my artwork deals with staring hard into ephemeral stuff. The cursory and fragmented subjects in my work come and go in the viewer’s eye, much like the fading imagery that reveals itself, then disappears, to the scryer of crystals.

A “thin place,” in Celtic Christianity, is one where, in the words of author Sylvia Maddox, ”the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God.” These paintings depict places I’ve encountered on recent travels where I have felt in touch with a kind of grace. Admittedly, my “thin places” are rather mundane and so are the illuminations I receive; when the “veil” lifts for me at the food court, I am more often stirred by humorous dread than holy vision.

I grew up in Iceland without the influence of mass media. I was twenty years old when I saw television for the first time. I read books, any book I could lay my hands on. There was one radio station. It had everything: novels, the world news, plays, poetry, Sunday sermons, music, concerts, all taken in by ear. Reading books and listening to the radio got me into the habit of making up my own visuals. Every voice, every story, every place or sound I heard or read about created an image in my head. Did that give me as distorted a view of the world as today’s media? It was distorted, for sure.

My painting is a contradiction between impulse in order. There is a deep sense of urgency that has been created in the new century that challenges the way I process my experiences into a visual reality. These groups of comic-inspired characters are locked in a claustrophobic horror vacuii Caricature of space. They are symbolic elements, as well as a form of the madness of reality. Circus-like sideshows creatures float in and out of shifting spaces, meandering through psychic spills like so much automatic writing.

I am inspired by the cacophony of daily life, particularly the weight and the flimsiness of it at once. Compelled by the pulsation of the beautiful and horrific relentlessly clashing, I create compositions of accumulation. Grouped or tangled together, I frequently use multiple distinct brushstrokes for their graphic directness, and highly saturated chroma in order to heighten the effect of color’s imprecise language. I am utterly seduced by the formal complexity of color, while I revel in its emotive slipperiness and enjoy mining its controversial decorativeness.