Icelandic artist Sigrun Olsen comes across as a quiet, reflective kind of person. It's not at all hard to see her as the meditation leader she is in Iceland. It's much harder to see her as a painter of "wild and crazy" pictures with "lots of movement and drops flying all over the place".
But that was before she suffered and overcame a serious illness in the 1980s. Afterwards, she found she couldn't paint for quite a while, and then when painting returned she discovered her style had changed altogether. This transformation, seeming to come from within, puzzled her at first. But she accepted it and soon was producing highly decorative and spiritual works like those in Golden Thoughts for the Winter Blues at Inner Space. It is her first UK exhibition and on until next February 2008.
"Iceland has special colours," Sigrun says. "Purity - in the skies, the elements, water, fire, ice: a lot of red, the colours of the earth." Her colours, she says, made it obvious to her tutors at Stuttgart where she trained that she came from Iceland.
The 15 watercolours are ablaze with red and orange colours and gold leaf decoration. "I've always loved the sunset," she says. "It has all the pinks and reds you can think of in it. And it's there every day - except for the one day a year when the sun doesn't go down - the setting sun reminding us of where we come from."
So, red and gold, a little white, a little green; angels too: all very Christmassy, you might think. But no, these stylised angels are different: they represent purity, love and healing. Sigrun explains, "They are expressions of a certain state of mind. The Angel of Purity, for example, stands in a lotus flower, a symbol of a completely pure or elevated state of mind."
I could have done with seeing some of those crazier pictures too. But for a moment's respite in the pre-Christmas rush, this small exhibition of mandalas, flowers, temple roof-tops and angels aimed at "warming the mind and the heart" may be just the thing.
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