From our living room to your favourite art shop: five years of artsupplies.is
Our fifth birthday · 2021–2026
Italian lessons,
thirteen square metres,
and five yearsof Myndlistarvöruverslunin
A short history of a shop that gradually took over our living room, outgrew its first home, and owes rather a lot to an Italian teacher.
An unexpected outcome of Italian lessons
When Lukas started taking Italian lessons online in 2020, opening an art supply store was not an obvious item on the syllabus.
His teacher, however, was good friends with the two Polish–Italian couples behind Renesans. Through that connection, we began ordering their art materials for our own work. Our artist friends soon wanted to join in, and before long, placing an order had become a group activity.
The system was beautifully straightforward: a catalogue, a pen, and a circle around whatever you wanted. Before we had an online shopping basket, we had enthusiastic annotations.
Looking back, this was already the beginning of the shop. We were choosing materials we wanted to use ourselves, sharing discoveries with other artists, and finding ways to bring them to Iceland. We just hadn’t given it a name yet.
The website opens.
The living room fills up.
The name, when it came, was artsupplies.is.
We sold art supplies. We were in Iceland. We felt we had covered the essentials.
While other people were mastering the art of lockdown bread, we were building a website. In October 2021, the online store officially opened, with a warehouse conveniently located in our living room.
Initially, this was quite practical. As the stock grew, it became less practical. Boxes accumulated, walking routes narrowed, and our furniture acquired some unexpected neighbours.
Then customers began asking a perfectly reasonable question: could they see the materials before buying them?
Of course they could. We started welcoming visitors at home and in our studio, introducing them to the paints and helping them choose. The boundary between our work, our home and our new business became increasingly difficult to locate.
We needed a shop.
Thirteen square metres, shared
Our first proper premises came thanks to Prent og Vinir, the artist-run initiative that offered to share its space at Laugarnesvegur 74a with us.
All thirteen square metres of it.
That was the total area, shared between us. Our weekday opening hours were 16:00–18:00, which gave customers a fairly precise window in which to develop an urgent need for paint.
It was tiny, but it meant a great deal. We had somewhere people could come specifically to browse, compare colours and talk about materials. We could put things on shelves intended for the purpose. We could close the shop and go home.
In the summer of 2022, we took over the whole space. The floor area remained exactly the same, but suddenly all thirteen square metres were ours.
Weronika, who has been responsible for the shop’s appearance from the beginning, set about making them count. Every shelf had a job. Every corner needed to justify its existence. It was an excellent education in shop design, with very little room for theoretical discussion.
One very small space.
Several of these solutions came with us when we moved. More space did not make a useful old cabinet any less useful.
The selection grows.
The building does not.
In 2023, we introduced regular opening hours and committed to developing the business further.
More paints arrived. More brushes followed. We added paper, including large individual sheets, and stretched canvases: excellent things to sell in a shop with almost no spare space.
Each addition came from the same enthusiasm that had started the catalogue orders. We would find something we wanted artists here to have access to, then work out how to bring it in. Finding somewhere to put it was a separate negotiation.
There was also a new development in 2024: together with Kremer Pigmente, we introduced the first edition of The Colors of Iceland, our own watercolour set featuring pigments made from Icelandic earth.
For two people who had begun by circling things in someone else’s catalogue, choosing the colours for a set of our own was quite a moment.
Meanwhile, the shop continued to fill up.
On 23 December 2024, our lack of space became particularly visible. Last-minute Christmas shoppers—mainly husbands—formed a neat queue outside, waiting for their turn to come in.
We were very pleased to see them. We were also beginning to suspect that rearranging the shelves again would not solve everything.
A look at our first paint shelves
Small beginnings, shelf by shelf. Some things have grown considerably. Others needed very little improvement.
A short journey and a very busy night
The solution was waiting on the other side of the building.
Our neighbours offered us a larger space with an entrance at Hrísateigur 47. We moved the shop overnight and opened the new premises on 15 March 2025.
After years of fitting everything into thirteen square metres, twice the space felt wonderfully generous. We could give the materials more room, make them easier to browse, and welcome people without quite so much choreography.
So many of you came to the opening. Seeing familiar customers find their way around the new shop made the move feel real: the little place we had built together had a new home.
That year, we also began our course programme, inviting people to spend time learning and working with materials under the guidance of practising artists. The conversations that had always happened around the shelves now had another place to continue.
Five candles
Today, the shop has more colours, more materials and more people involved in its daily life than we could have fitted into that first room.
The Colors of Iceland is now in its third edition, made especially for our fifth anniversary. It includes eight watercolours, three of them made from Icelandic earth pigments, and a travel brush bearing the shop’s name. It is a small object with a considerable amount of our attention and affection in it.
We are still artists running an art supply shop, and that continues to shape the way we choose things. We want to know what a material does, how it feels to use, and what someone might make with it. Sometimes that leads to a new product on the shelves. Sometimes it leads to a very long conversation about a particular shade of blue.
Some of you have been with us since the catalogue days. Some visited our living room or studio. Some fitted your shopping into those two afternoon hours, and some waited outside on that December evening. Others have only recently found us at Hrísateigur.
Together, you have given us the confidence to keep going, introduce unfamiliar materials and make room for more.
You’re invited
Come and have
a slice of cake
We’re celebrating our fifth birthday on 24–25 October, and we would love you to join us at Hrísateigur 47.
There will be cake, coffee, a lottery for customers, and 20% off almost everything in the shop.
Thank you for every visit, every recommendation to a friend, and every project you have let us play a small part in.
Myndlistarvöruverslunin · 5 years
Cake · Coffee · Customer lottery