Pastime

3 November 2010 - 9 January 2011

Ágúst was born in Suðureyri in 1944. For most of his life he worked as a seaman, but illness forced him to stop for three years, beginning in 1996.  At that time, a series of teaching programmes by the American artist Bob Ross was running on television. Ágúst was inspired by what he saw there and decided to experiment with painting, which has since become his hobby.
His art is characterized by his interest in creating interplays and contrasts in colour, and in the course of time he has switched from brush to palette-knife. “This enables me to use the fact that the paint gets onto the canvas in a more ‘random’ way,” he says.  “Sometimes I think this gives a better result.”
In recent years he has been revising and recasting more and more of his pictures after they were supposedly complete. Thus, his older works have taken on a new lease of life and acquired a new value.
The inspiration of the moment has been the dominant force in Ágúst’s creative work.  As he says himself: “I paint for the enjoyment of it.”