It felt like Harrogate was already trying on Christmas. The lights were twinkling, the winter coats and woolly jumpers were out, and at RedHouse Originals on Cheltenham Mount there were mulled Negronis.
I asked Danny Larsen which of his paintings he thought I should look at first. He’d been thinking about that question all day and kept changing his mind. At that particular moment, he said, it was the thistle.
A little spiky, a little tired, a little fragile. “A little bit of punk rock in it,” he added.
That was Danny Larsen on a Thursday evening in Harrogate. By morning, he might have picked another flower.
Larsen grew up in Norway and made a career as a professional snowboarder, travelling the world and making artwork within the industry. In 2012 he showed a small collection of drawings at the Etnies store in Amsterdam. Later, working alongside other artists in Oslo’s Brenneriveien collective, he developed the technique for which he’s now known. He varied the distribution of dots across the surface to make light gather and recede. There was a particular thing he wanted to see if he could get down on paper. “I started painting with dots because I wanted to capture fog,” he told me. “What does fog look like? It looks like nothing.”
His early landscapes often drew on the woods near his home on the edge of Krokskogen. There was a rule about where he could find a painting. Everything had to be within walking distance. For someone who’d once travelled the world for work, that was a very different way to decide where to go. He spoke about it in more personal terms.
“For my whole life, I’ve struggled quite a bit with depression,” he said. He described how readily his eye went to the gloomy parts of things and how he began, deliberately and repeatedly, to look for what else was there. “I just tried to see the beauty of every mundane, everyday object.”
He recognised something of that instinct in David Hockney and was plainly delighted to tell me he’d met him in London. What fascinates Larsen is the decision that comes before Hockney makes a mark. “Why did he choose that?” he said. It’s a good question to bring back to Yorkshire, where Hockney has given so much time to roads and trees many of us pass without a second glance. It also gets you a fair way into what Larsen is doing with a thistle.
Earlier this year, Larsen came off his bike, landed on a rock and broke his ribs. Raising an arm hurt enough to keep him from painting for months. He went out walking and, at the pace his injuries allowed, began seeing how much was happening at the roadside. When he could work again, he sat with his knees drawn up and a watercolour block on his lap. The twenty works in Silver Linings, all watercolour and ink on paper, came out of that period.
He remembers seeing the thistle on his way through the forest to the studio. He took a quick picture on his phone so he could refer to the stem, the leaves and the flower head. Then he put the phone away. “I just kind of let my memory and intuition do the working,” he explained. Look closely at that particular picture, he told me, and you’ll find bits of a plant that never grew in the forest. I’d told him the paintings made me think of botanical illustrations, with all their exacting detail. He was quick to point out how much he’d made up. The detail gives you a plant you can believe in. What he adds gives you a sense of how it felt to stop for it.
“I don’t look at them as paintings of flowers,” he said. “I look at them as more like sides of my personality.” He can see which ones he painted when he was tired, which when he was sad and which when he was happy.
He’d seen the twenty together in his studio, but Harrogate was the first time he saw them all framed. He told me he’d spent what he reckoned was at least an hour looking at the first one he made, downstairs near the temporary bar. It looked different to him there. “I kind of understand more of myself now,” he said, reflectively.
I asked him what he was glad to have found in the accident that gave the show its name. He talked about being forced to slow down, and the pleasure of sitting in Harrogate knowing people were coming in to see the paintings. The plural matters to him. He thinks of the twenty as one work, with each picture holding something different that he found in those months.
For a painter who’s spent much of his career working in monochrome, the amount of colour in these small pictures took some nerve. “I’ve always been scared of using colour,” he told me. Then came what he called “a true, like, fuck it moment”. It was liberating, he said, and he can already see it changing the way he paints now he’s back at the canvas. Lately he’s had an urge to try orange. At the time we spoke, he hadn’t quite got to it.
There’s something else he wants from colour. Larsen makes short videos and loves the way a petal twitches when you touch its stem, or the way grasses move in the wind. He’s found that when the light catches the colours in some of the new paintings, the image seems to shift as you move from side to side. The man who wanted to paint fog would now quite like to paint the wind. “But how? I have no idea yet.”
Before we finished, I asked him what I should really be looking for if I went out walking a route I knew by heart. Headphones were strictly forbidden. I was to walk slowly, feel each step and give up on achieving anything along the way. Then he told me that was how he thought about making the paintings, too.
“Each dot is a moment of appreciation.”
Danny Larsen’s Silver Linings runs until Saturday 12 December 2026 at RedHouse Originals, 15 Cheltenham Mount, Harrogate, HG1 1DW. Visitor information.
