iceland paintings

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 an easy and simple task was not so. At first I painted 3 pointilist paintings-nice but not enough.Something was missing.Painting Iceland-I felt- was not about just 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 astist Richard Serra tells us in an interview with Mark Rosenthal -how did afangar come about- about his first sight of Iceland " 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 paintings I didn't like.The old paintings were painted impasto-so by painting on them without scraping them clean I acheived-I hope- 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 landscape I had seen and sketched..One such painting is the one seen here-a 20 cm * 30cm painting of black rugged cliffs coming out of the rough grey sea
more paintings can be seen in my site-http://www.dattner-art.com