About Gunnar Olafsson

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My very first exposure to the creative process was during my high school Art classes at School. Thereafter, in the big bad world, I had only a couple of cursory flirtations, the first being when I enrolled onto a Drawing and Painting evening class at the Glasgow School of Art. I proudly brought my first still life piece home and my cat promptly felt compelled to express his opinion.  Indeed he expressed it all over the canvas. Devastated in the face of such forthright opinion and handicapped by the commitments of my healthcare job, painting departed from my life for, what I felt would be, forever.

 

It was to be twenty two years before it was to reappear and this time it was here to stay. In 2010 I travelled to Galway to attend an oil and pastel painting class conducted by an incredibly talented Irish landscape artist called Philip Gray (www.philipgray.com). It awakened within me a passion for painting that was to become a hugely important part of my life. For the last four years he has guided me in a process of painting that is free and fluid. To play with light, tones, colour and their combinations, in ways that hopefully create seascapes that stimulate and elicit an emotional response. I have tried to learn and utilise the various techniques that he has developed and to experiment with the contrasts and combinations of a variety of highly pigmented colours.

 

Living in Gardenstown provides me with limitless opportunities for inspiration. Her ever changing light, her vast spectrum of colours and her capricious mood swings are always there to drive me on as I work in my Lookout Studio.