Later, and quite coincidently, I was struck by a satellite picture of the “Burning Man festival” in Nevada at the edge of the Black Rock desert. Its semi circular stages and fences resembled a hexagram and appeared to be the counterpart to the surrounding structures of the desert. It was a picture whose alluring colours held the same fascination as those seen in Iceland. They also had the same tension, relationship and interaction between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the artificial.

In its contrapuntal, polarised and, at the same time, contingent nature this represents a surprising insight into my own ways of thinking and the structure of my own character. The sensual excess that I look for in my painting is contrasts with a precision that can sometimes border on the pedantic, is part of my essence and finds concrete expression in technical processes.

When human beings intervene into nature it is not always destructive – It is that, of course – but in the right circumstances it can give us a phenomenological and aesthetic approach to our subject.