Iceland review - 2002, Qupperneq 33

“There is a certain purity of air which is Icelandic.”
Kristín Gudrún Gunnlaugsdóttir scrutinises the late
morning light out the window of her second-storey liv-
ing room. “You can see distances really clearly here.”
This light is the one specifically Icelandic characteristic
that Kristín can pinpoint in her own work. “When I was
a little girl and we went abroad, my father, who is an
Icelander, used to say, ‘It’s a pity you can’t see clearly.’ For
him, it was always a bit foggy and misty. The outlines in
the distance were not as clear.”
Maybe working in such lucidity helps Kristín illuminate
the interior worlds of her paintings – it would explain
the marked clearness of vision in her classical figurative
paintings that brings the remote themes of spiritual
longing, nostalgia, and man’s separation from God to
life with warm, disarming clarity.
In 1987, Kristín left Iceland to live in a convent in
Rome for a year. “I just wanted to have a break from
everything I knew, and the world,” Kristín recalls. “It felt
like coming home, in a way,” she says of her time there,
where a resident nun taught her the art of icon painting.
“My need to go reflects a certain longing inside me for
quietness, and contemplation, which has always been a
part of my work.” While subsequently in Florence, she
studied the pre-medieval art that she still employs to
depict her spiritual world. Her contemporary body of
work is united aesthetically and thematically; each paint-
ing is unmistakably hers.
Kristín has always worked full-time as an artist. Since
returning to Iceland in 1996, she has made downtown
Reykjavík her home with her children, Melkorka and
Killian, and their father, Brian FitzGibbon. “Iceland is a
very small place for an artist, but Reykjavík is the limit to
survive. It’s difficult here even, but I’ve always survived
like this, so I’ll stay like this.” She has received two state
grants from the Icelandic Ministry of Culture, and one
year-long grant from her hometown of Akureyri. In
Stykkishólmur in western Iceland, Kristín was commis-
sioned to paint the largest oil on canvas altarpiece in the
country: a luminous Madonna and Child, completed
when she herself was pregnant.
“The world is getting fuller and rounder. I used to
focus more on one aspect in a painting, but now I try to
grab it all,” Kristín says. In the past year, she has begun
to incorporate landscape into her work. She completed
her first large-scale landscape painting, ‘White
Mountain’, in 2001. “I just feel like I’m up to it. Maybe
it’s because I had my children. I’m more down to earth.”
Still, she assures that the landscapes she’s beginning are
purely imaginative and not grounded in Icelandic geog-
raphy.
“I used to go out and talk about art,” Kristín contin-
ues. “Now I do much less of it. I’m at work more. I’m
more independent, and I’m more personal in my art.”
Her focus on the psychically distant subjects of her paint-
ings becomes sharper and sharper each year. “I feel like
a polar bear on an iceberg – I’m on my own. I’m just
doing my thing here.”
“My need to go reflects a certain
longing inside me for quietness,
and contemplation, which has
always been a part of my work.”
Krístín Gudrún Gunnlaugsdóttir
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