Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2014, Side 24

24 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2014
Art | Interview
“Grýla”
The general idea here was to paint
Grýla the way she might have
looked if she were a real person (as
a vagrant, more or less). I thought it
would make for a more interesting
painting if I would show her hav-
ing broken into a house, and eating a
child right there and then.
“Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir”
This work is part of a series (that I
never completed) of “cover paint-
ings,” i.e. paintings based on other
peoples’ paintings and images. The
picture on the back of the 5,000
krónur bill served as the basis for this
particular painting. I just thought it
was a fascinating image—I especially
like the headgear that the ladies are
wearing.
Þrándur On Some Of His Paintings
need any additional information to see
what’s happening, apart from the title,
that’s something good.”
Þrándur has found a lot of success in
Iceland, despite still being in a relatively
early stage of his artistic career. In the
year 2008, he first became able to earn a
living entirely from selling his art, which
is quite an achievement for anyone—es-
pecially during that economically tu-
multuous era. The advent of the internet
has also contributed to his success. For
whatever reason, his painting of Grýla
eating a baby in all her hag-ish glory
surfaced on popular web-portal Red-
dit—unbeknownst to Þrándur—where it
received a lot of attention from all over
the world, leading to even more acclaim
at home. “It seems to be a pattern in Ice-
land, whenever people in other coun-
tries notice something that an Icelander
has done, only then do other Icelanders
start paying attention.”
Þrándur’s paintings could be con-
strued as illustrations in the vein of the
Old Masters’ paintings. Rarely did art-
ists like Leonardo or Titan or Van Eyck
create because they were uniquely in-
spired to. They painted the things they
did because their viewer was already fa-
miliar with the subject, most of them be-
ing commissions. When viewed in this
light, Þrándur’s work assumes a purpose
akin to that of the stained glass windows
of yore, used in churches and cathe-
drals to tell the illiterate masses what
the hell the guy at the front was saying
in Latin. These windows and paintings
were there to illustrate a story that the
audience already knew and could recog-
nize, usually of a religious or historical
nature. The major difference with Þrán-
dur’s work, then, is that he’s not being
commissioned, and that he does choose
stories and themes because he feels in-
spired by them. In this sense, the crux of
his work is that he sticks to what others
are already familiar with, instead of in-
venting his own stories.
He’s not necessarily looking to edu-
cate the viewer on his subjects, though.
Even if not everyone is familiar with the
Icelandic Census of 1703, for example, it
doesn’t matter to Þrándur as long as he’s
succeeded in making a compelling im-
age. “I’m just happy to paint and make
a living from it, that’s my main goal. It’s
not often that I feel like, ‘Oh this, I must
tell people this, I must convey this in a
painting.’ That’s not usually how I go
about it. You know every now and then,
I feel like I want to. But then again, if I
have a message that I feel strongly about
getting across, usually I think painting is
not the right medium to do so.”
When asked what he thinks of the
sentiment that painting is dead, as is
sometimes declared by those who credit
the invention of photography with kill-
ing it, Þrándur responds that’s simply
not true. “I think painting is a very pow-
erful medium; you can do a lot of things
that photography can’t. And that’s just
almost like saying that, you know, mov-
ies are dead after the advent of computer
games, you know... whatever.” It has its
limitations like any medium does, but it
also has its unique strengths.
“Painting has been declared dead
so many times and always when people
think it is, it has a comeback and be-
comes very fashionable again, and the
really big collectors, like Saatchi and
those people, all of the sudden they start
buying very expensive paintings.” It’s
unoriginal to even declare the death
of painting anymore, he says, since the
sentiment’s been proven wrong over and
over again. However, the issue of money
in art is a contentious one. Some argue
that it has no place in true art, where
others argue that art is a commodity like
anything else. Þrándur says, “If no one
is buying it, if no one can make a living
from it, then it automatically gets re-
duced to a hobby thing.”
Dropping out
Þrándur’s education in art has been un-
traditional, or traditional, depending
on how you look at it. He attended Lis-
taháskóli Íslands, the Iceland Academy
of the Arts, for a year before dropping
out. He says: “it wasn’t that much a dis-
agreement, but rather because it was the
Old Masterly painting styles that I want-
ed, and there wasn’t really any place
for that in the school. So I just figured
I might as well drop out. Nevertheless,
I had a good time in school. The social
life and the atmosphere were fine, but
I wasn’t really learning what I wanted
to.” He also says that “they emphasized
concept quite a lot there, and I wasn’t
comfortable doing that.”
Indeed, it’s clear that to him, tech-
nique is more important, though maybe
not overwhelmingly so. As he says, “how
you arrange it and how you do it is the
same as with a movie. Of course, the
script is very important, but if you have a
lousy director, it’s never going to amount
to anything. A very good director could
make a great movie out of a lousy script.
I think how you make a painting—the
formal parts—is more important than
the idea behind it, or the motifs. You can
have the best motif or idea in the world,
but if you haven’t got the skills or the
ability to really get it across, then it won’t
do you much good.”
Within the art education system
Þrándur thinks that students should
have a choice and not be forced one way
or the other. “I don’t believe that one
should sort of come at the cost of the
other. I think that everything should be
two different schools. So there should be
two different departments or something
like that within a school. I think there
should be a chance, there should be op-
portunity for people who want to study
technique to do so.”
Discussing Iceland’s art academy
in particular, he says, “it sort of domi-
nates the whole thing. It’s pretty much
the only serious art school. I know a lot
of people who went in there, young peo-
ple that are good draftsmen and enjoy
drawing and painting and sort of come
out of the school having left all that be-
hind. I’ve seen it quite a few times. And
it’s a bit of a shame. If the talents go to
waste. But then again, perhaps one can’t
blame the art school because, I mean,
it’s true that that isn’t what is sort of rel-
evant today, the big thing. Nevertheless,
I always think it’s a shame when people
are discouraged from doing what they
really enjoy.”
The myth, the man,
the legend
Þrándur had a choice: assimilate or leave.
And so, in 2003, he left. He worked on
his own for a while
before running into
celebrated Norwe-
gian painter Odd
Nerdrum, the face
of the Kitsch Move-
ment, on the street
in Reykjavík one
day. As he tells it: “I
was walking down
Laugavegur with a
few friends, when I
saw him. They sort
of dared me into ap-
proaching him, so I
chased him into Mál
og menning [book-
store]. And he was
taken aback that I spoke Norwegian, he
thought I was a journalist or something.
I told him that I was
Icelandic and living
here, and he said,
‘Oh yeah, come by
the house tomor-
row.’ And I did and
we spoke a bit, and
that’s how it start-
ed.”
For the next three
years or so, Þrándur
joined Odd’s infor-
mal school of paint-
ing. Odd wasn’t a
teacher and no one
was taking classes,
it was more of a
mentorship where
everyone painted together in his house,
the old Reykjavík Library. The best way
“After he started painting
with Odd, people would
frequently ask him if he
was going to paint his
erect penis, too.”
Art is a loaded term, encompass-
ing just about everything, from
a performance about just sitting
around in MoMA for a really long
time, to documenting the smash-
ing of an ancient Chinese vase, to
wrapping up buildings and bridges
around the world, to making a giant
chrome balloon animal sculpture.
There was once a time where the
only accepted form of art (in West-
ern Europe, at least) was realism,
both painted and sculpted, as in
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seven-
teenth century span during which
the Renaissance and all its pre- and
post- movements were in full swing.
Get Real