I Am Not An Artist.
As a child I remember looking through my father’s books on Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo with complete amazement. How was it possible that paint and stone could be transformed into flesh? At the age of eleven my only thoughts were, “I would like to be able to do that”, and so I drew incessantly.
Fast forward to the age of twenty and I had made the decision that painting would not just be a hobby, but my live’s work. The more I pursued this path however, the more discouraged I became. In the hopes of applying, I took tours of art schools. None of them taught what I wanted to learn. I wanted to paint like Leonardo! Any art history book or documentary I could find, I devoured, only to find that you had to paint like Picasso or Rothko in the modern age. I began to make detached modern paintings, which only increased the bitterness I felt towards art.
The more dissatisfied I became, the more I began researching old master techniques and painters with the idea that the “true art” would one day come back.
Then it happened. I came across a video on Youtube. It was a discussion between Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton about the values of kitsch. In all honesty I didn’t understand a thing, but I was intrigued and began looking for more information. As soon as I found out that Odd Nerdrum ran a school for painting I applied, and in January of 2017 I arrived in his Norwegian studio. It was there that I began to learn the differences between kitsch and art. The more I learned the more I could see that the old masters and modernists were based in completely opposing philosophies, something I had not even considered before. While the old masters worked in a tradition of handcraft where storytelling and skill are developed through decades of practice and competition, artists rely on creativity and originality, demoting skill to something unnecessary and even bad.
Despite the knowledge of the philosophy and history behind the terms art and kitsch, I was still hesitant to leave behind the word art. It wasn’t until months after I had left the Nerdrum school that I realised something which seems so obvious to me now. Quite simply it’s the fact that you can’t change people who don’t want to change. It’s the exact same for anyone who has ever known a drug addict or has been in a bad relationship. You can however change the way you respond to these people. Let me put it this way. Imagine you were in a political party or club that held completely opposite views from your own. Would you try to change the entire party to your views? Would you change your views to match the party’s? Or would you leave and find a party that held similar views to yourself. I would choose the latter, and that is why I call myself a kitsch painter and not an artist.