painting iceland 2

I have been working on my Iceland paintings for about 5 months.I had scores of sketches  done on the spot and my wifes photos.and of course my memories.To my surprise what I thought would be easy and simple task was not so.At first I painted 3 pointalist painting-nice but not enough.Something was missing.Painting Iceland-I felt- was not just about  painting beautiful places. I remembered  our first sight of the landcape-a dark cloudy morning-black lava around us-and Genessis came to mind "first god made heaven and earth,the earth was without form and void,and darkness was upon the face of the deep" The  artist Richard Serra tells in an interview with  Mark Rosenthal -how did afangar come about-" my first impression of the landscape.......was one of stark , immense vastness.piles of lava strata extend to the horizon.there are no trees....I was completely taken by the strangeness of the land...to put it simply-it is another space".  I then painted about ten small canvases.The canvaases were old paintingsI didn like.The old paintings were painted impasto-so by painting on them without scraping them clean I got-hopefully- the impression of the raw and wild landscape.The compositions are very simple.  The paintings are both  figurative and abstract.-There are mountains and seas and lava- but-they represent an idea-not real landscapeI had seen and

 sketched..One such painting is the one seen here-a 20 cm * 20 cm painting of black rugged cliffs coming out of the grey rough sea.Others can be seen in the Iceland paintings gallery.