In what way was such a two dimensional painting to develop? In time changes were bound to take place. In this country many turned to Lyrical Abstracts or pure Abstract Expressionism due to influences from the United States. Effects of Op art however, cannot be observed except in the works of Höröur Ágústsson who as early as 1955 had become acquainted with such experiments through Vasarely, yet this art was the logical follow-on to Concretism. However there were no major changes in Karl’s works. Under the influences of Richard Mortensen and the French school the strict composition relaxed and became more organic and at the same time poetic. He allowed forms to superimpose and created thereby a strong spatial effect. These pictures produced during the period 1958-70 were all done in gouache. In them he occasionally plays freely with the colour surface and attempts to open it by allowing another colour to shine through. From this synopsis it can be established that Karl developed that painting style which was characteristic for him. It was based on a rigid form construction where the drawing was the main element and colours were used to build up the space. In the previously quoted interview Karl stated: I believe that one has to go through a very strict and exacting training in drawing, even academic muscular drawing, in order to achieve a feeling for things as a whole, for the totality of the canvas.4 And this is precisely what all his works centre on in the latter part of his career. Everything is based on the line and the overall movement, which is precisely what had been the keynote of Boyesen’s course. This development could clearly be observed in the seventies when Karl again began to work on large paintings in oils. The works also exhibited more movement than before due to lines which began to spread over the entire surface. In his previous works movement was achieved more by the colours themselves. Delaunay’s rings now appear as large elliptical rings, whole or halved, which spread across the entire surface, stretching and multiplying, or as superimposed open rings over the entire surface. The canvas is also divided vertically by a few, broad, soft bands. Movement on the canvas is created by the line itself. It creates a circuit of forms which either approach or recede depending on the interaction of individual lines and nature of the colours. Here the utmost use is made of the picture’s surface. This is demonstrated well in the painting Spring (Vor) which is owned by the Roman Catholic Hospital, Landakot, in Reykjavík. In this work, superimposed, black, arching lines stretch across the entire surface against a background of areas of various colours. In Karl’s paintings after 1980 it is even more obvious how important the line and overall movement have become. The basic content is the same as in his pictures from the seventies. His palette becomes less varied and is restricted to white, black and wine red, in addition to blue, and movement on the canvas is thereby curbed. Karl does not use colour as an independent organic medium, utilizing its inherent texture, but rather experiments exhaustively 21

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