My mother, Karólína Lárusdóttir, who has died aged 74, was a printmaker and painter originally from Iceland, but who lived most of her life in the UK, mainly in and around Cambridge.

Karólína’s works are evocative of her childhood in Reykjavik, underpinned by the mystic elements of Icelandic culture. Her grandfather, Johannes Josefsson, an Icelandic wrestling champion who worked as a strongman with Barnum and Bailey’s circus and with the escapologist Harry Houdini, founded Hotel Borg, Reykjavik’s first luxury hotel, in 1930. Many of Karólína’s prints and paintings are populated by the hotel’s clients and workers going about their business.

“Through sheer obstinacy I managed to discover the kinds of faces I wanted, faces that were both general and specific,” Karólína said. Interspersed with these figures are angels, otherworldly but just as real, communicating and living among them. Surprising but familiar, Karólína’s art is a mixture of the mundane with the extraordinary, depicting the everyday alongside the surreal.

Born in Reykjavik to Daisy Josefson and her husband, Larus Ludvigsson, a businessman, Karólína went to Menntaskólinn school. Moving to the UK in the 1960s, she studied art for a year at Sir John Cass College, east London, then went to Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, graduating with a BA in fine art in 1967. In the same year she married Clive Percival, a businessman whom she met in London. They went on to have two children, Stephen and me. Ten years later Karólína returned to art college, studying printmaking during evening classes at Barking School of Art, Essex.

Karólína Lárusdóttir in her studio

From the early 80s onwards, Karólína showed regularly, both in the UK and internationally. She was included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on several occasions, most recently in 2012, and she was also featured in The Renewal of Icelandic Painting at Listasavn Foröya, Þórshöfn, Iceland (2006), and The ING Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries, London (2008).

Karólína’s work is in many collections, including those of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the British Museum in London and Listasafn ASÍ and Listasafn Reykjavikur in Reykjavik. Two solo shows of her prints, at Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Oxford, and Castle Gallery, Inverness, were held last month.

The Angel and the Horse, 2009, etching and aquatint on paper, by Karólína Lárusdóttir. Photograph: By courtesy of the estate of Karólína Lárusdóttir

She and Clive divorced in 1979, and in 1983 Karólína married Fred Roberts, a psychologist. Fred died in 2002. In 2011 she returned to Iceland, and two years later suffered a stroke.

Karólína was generous, vulnerable and fierce at the same time, full of love, and with a sense of fun and delight in the world.

She is survived by Stephen and me, her stepdaughter, Jane, and her grandchildren, Boyd, Elis, Ida, Abigail, Owen and Jack.