John Whilliam Stepehnson (1946)

John Whilliam Stepehnson) who was born in Minnesota, USA but grew up and has lived in Northern California. His mother was Icelandic and his father Norwegian.​ JWS studied art  Berkeley Academia, the renowned Department of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, has been painting and mosaicing ever since.

The energy and the universe have been the source of JW's work for the last 10 years and into the works  he therefore interweaves the miracle of science called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).​  JWS uses strong and bright colors in its expression of the outside world and the driving force of life. An unusual mix of physics  and human driving force  is the message that the artist sends to us through his work.

Although JWS did not live in Iceland for more than a year as a child, his artistic roots extend to Iceland.  His grandmother was the artist Kristrún Hallgrímsson, who was the first Icelandic woman to complete her piano playing for solo and teaching and at the same time pursued art with great dexterity and courage.

In addition, Kristrún had a keen interest in astronomy and subscribed to journals about that science. There, her range truly overlaps with that of her grandson  in California.

The fateful story of Kristrún Granny JWS has been on the minds of many Icelanders, but  Ólafur Jóhann Jóhannsson partly described it in the novel "Höll minninganna".  Kristrún's story is one of the topics discussed in Hafnaloft's program "Window of the past" which is presented under the heading "Events" here on the website.