Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2014, Side 25

Art | Interview
25The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2014
“Sunnan til Herðu-
breiðar”
This work belongs to a series, made
from the poem "Áfangar" by Jón
Helgason, where I made a painting
to each verse. This painting corre-
sponds to a verse that describes the
hardships endured by one Iceland’s
most celebrated outlaws: Fjalla-Ey-
vindur, who spent winters alone, in
a hole in the ground, up in the high-
lands.
“Óðinn and Gunnlöð”
There is a story that tells how Odin
put on a worm outfit (“orms-hamur”)
in order to dig himself into the place
where Gunnlöð, the guardian of the
mead of poetry, was staying. Odin
stayed with her for three nights, and
each night he would have a sip of the
precious mead. What appealed to me
here was the chance to paint a beau-
tiful nocturnal scene of a loving cou-
ple, wrapped up by a rather disgust-
ing, Cthulhu-esque worm.
“Reykjavík Pavilion in
Theory”
The basic idea behind this series
was to make an idealised version of
Reykjavík, one that does not corre-
spond with any particular moment in
time. I essentially replaced all of the
ugly buildings with something bet-
ter looking. As you can see from this
one, I have no love for City Hall, and
I would be perfectly happy to see it
torn down to make room for a grand
mosque.
What went into the
cover painting?
When I originally conceived
of the idea, I wanted it to be
the same composition of Hu-
gleikur’s comic, but because
I was doing it for the cover
of the Grapevine, I thought
it should be in a vertical for-
mat. I had wanted to paint
transparent ghostly pictures
of people for some time, and
all of the sudden, I thought,
maybe I could do it for Hu-
gleikur’s Huldufólk thing. It’s
often that an idea for a paint-
ing springs out of an effect
that I would like to use. It’s quite easy to render
these half-transparent things in oil paint.
For the Huldufólk, I thought that they should
probably look like people from the old times in
Iceland. I could have put them in contemporary
clothing, but I think that would just be confusing.
So I dressed them in old garments and gave them
expressionless faces. It didn’t really turn out the
way I foresaw it, but it was close enough, I think.
Are you satisfied with it?
Yeah, I am quite satisfied with it. I hadn’t seen it
in a while when Haukur sent me a photo of it, and
I saw it again a couple weeks ago and thought:
“Yeah, it’s not bad.” I’m very rarely completely
satisfied. It was close enough to the mark.
Are elves a common narrative in Ice-
landic culture?
... No.
Is it more foreigners thinking, “Oh
those Icelanders and their elves!”?
Yeah, I think so. I sometimes get the impres-
sion that some Icelanders want foreigners to
think that of us. They try to tell people that. For
instance, I was in Reykjavík this summer and I
came across a group of tourists and a guide who
were walking along. When they came upon a
big rock in Grjótaþorpið, I heard him telling the
tourists: “Yeah, most Icelanders believe in elves
and faeries.” Like, two out of three Icelanders or
something, he said. Which I don’t really think is
the case. I don’t know anybody who believes in
them.
I remember reading something
about how 90% of Icelanders believe
in Hidden People and how you guys
even diverted the construction of
a highway so the elves wouldn’t be
disturbed.
I don’t know where they
get these statistics from. I
don’t know anybody who
believes in them. Not that it
matters that much. I think,
if anything, more people are
inclined to believe in ghosts.
There are quite a few people
who aren’t really that su-
perstitious, but still won’t
rule out the possibility of
ghosts. Not that I’m one,
though.
So is there a connec-
tion between the hid-
den people and the sa-
gas. Do they feature heavily in those
at all?
No, I don't think so at all.

I’m still trying to figure out where
this elf thing came from.
I think that like with most of these folklore crea-
tures in Iceland, it’s something that’s common to
other Nordic countries in general. I don’t think
there are really any of these creatures that one
couldn’t find some variety of in other places. And
the distinction between the elves and the hidden
people, I don’t know if that’s clear either.
Yeah, they seem to be interchange-
able. But I’m not really an elf expert
or historian or anything like that.
I think it’s mostly a nineteenth century belief that
became really popular.
Are you a fan of Hugleikur Dags-
son's work? Do you have a favourite
drawing of his?
Yes, I am a big fan of his work. I have a drawing
that he made when he was about ten years old, of
an armed to the teeth alien with several mouths,
eyes, a peg leg made of gold, and alien skulls tied
around its neck. I guess that would be one of my
favourites.

You're cousins, right? Do you feel
like you might have similar ap-
proaches to art, even though the
methods you employ are drastically
different?
There are quite a few similarities in our output,
most notably with regards to our subject matter.
Folklore creatures and legends feature heavily in
our works, and we share an affinity for the Norse
mythology. We used to make drawings together
when we were kids, so it is no coincidence that
our works would overlap.
People
Fucking,
Elves Watching
to learn something is to watch someone better than
you do it, and that’s exactly what Þrándur did.
Odd Nerdrum is a strange and talented guy who
has inspired some weird stories about what goes on
in his informal schools. One of the more persistent
rumours is that he would make everybody get naked
to do their painting. When asked about this, Þrándur
laughed and said, “No we never did that. Though I
did pose for him quite a lot. Everybody, all the stu-
dents posed for him, especially the first-year ones.
He would give the senior students a break and let the
newcomers do all the heavy posing.”
Although Þrándur says that Odd is very sociable,
charismatic and interesting to talk to, he notes that
the stories that circulated about him are under-
standable, given that the posters plastered all over
town for his first Icelandic show, at Kjarvalsstaðir,
featured his painting "Self-portrait in Golden Cape,"
which shows him gazing at the viewer while lifting
up his dressing gown, revealing a very erect penis.
It’s not a revolutionary thing to paint a penis, even
a whopping boner as is depicted in Odd’s piece, but
people will make assumptions about anything. Þrán-
dur says that after he started painting with Odd, peo-
ple would frequently ask him if he was going to paint
his erect penis, too.
As he describes it, the way that Þrándur learned
from Odd was similar to how the Old Masters
learned back in their time. Instead of going to an
academy, they’d apprentice with an established art-
ist and learn by observing and practising. Odd usu-
ally had young artists from around the world but
mainly Americans, Norwegians and Icelanders dur-
ing Þrándur’s time, and they would paint with him
wherever he was in an informal
sort of school. He didn’t teach,
necessarily, just allowed others
to paint with him, giving advice
when asked. As is inevitable and
natural when working closely
with someone whose talents
one admires, Þrándur absorbed
many of Odd’s painting tech-
niques. Because his goal was
to learn techniques, he says, “I
never had any sort of problems
with that, or with the idea that I
should not try to be doing what
he’s doing. I wouldn’t paint his
motifs, just his style.”
Since leaving Odd’s ar-
tistic company in 2008, Þrándur has moved away
from emulating his methods, incorporating them
into something that is very much his own. He says
it’s quite alright to take your time in finding your
style, but that Odd’s perhaps dominates that of his
students’ to a greater than desirable extent. Indeed,
many of his former students’ work falls into the
Kitsch Movement, a movement defined by Odd in his
2000 book ‘On Kitsch’ as the techniques of the Old
Masters combined with the motifs of romanticism
and emotionally charged imagery, all tied up with a
narrative thread. Þrándur says that when going to a
Kitsch Biennale, “the paintings are for the most part
all very close to each other in look and in subject mat-
ter.” To some it could be difficult to distinguish who
did what.
Þrándur doesn’t quite see himself in that school.
There’s too much emphasis on the emotional, too
much heartfelt subject matter. It’s kind of like sap-
py emotional poetry about feelings: fine for some
people, not for others. When asked why he wouldn’t
want to paint in such a way, he laughs and says, “It’s
just that my Icelandic mentality doesn’t fit quite
well with it. I don’t know, I’m more into Grýla eat-
ing children.” His style certainly draws an influence
from Odd, but he’s not copying like a student would.
“I guess I’ve pretty much immersed his style into
my own. I’m sure that I could spot something that’s
very Nerdrum-esque in my paintings now, but style
evolves naturally. Sometimes you’ll see a painter that
makes a decision to break entirely from what they
have done in the past and do something completely
new. I’ve never really done that. It’s grown naturally.
But I guess my paintings are much less obviously
Nerdrum-esque than they were five years ago.”
Philosophising on art
Þrándur says he’s fascinated by the idea of original-
ity, having made originality in the sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries the topic of his recently com-
pleted bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Iceland. He says the term wasn’t used in refer-
ence to art (be it music, fine art, or literature) much
at all before the eighteenth century. He says he “just
wanted to learn whether anybody who, for instance,
was accused of being unoriginal, though the word
did not exist, and if it was seen as a virtue in the cre-
ative arts, if something was outstandingly original.”
What he found is that it didn’t figure much into the
discussion either way, and that competition between
artists was more about trying to outdo one another
in quality. He found that “stealing ideas from other
people was just seen as a natural and positive thing.
If they could take an idea and do it better, that would
be fine.”
Raphael, one of the greatest Old Masters, is a clas-
sic example of the patchwork technique method that
was celebrated. As Þrándur explored in his thesis,
“in painting, Raphael is often cited as the unoriginal
one. He mostly took from Leonardo and Michelan-
gelo and a few others, borrowing
the best aspects of their work and
combining it into a unified style.
None of those aspects were really
his, but he just did them really
well, and that’s why he became so
popular.”
He says he’d like to incorpo-
rate his philosophical studies into
his paintings, but hasn’t gotten
to a point with either to where
it would be natural. Right now,
he’s starting to think about his
master’s thesis in philosophy, but
hasn’t quite narrowed down his
topic. He’s thinking about immi-
gration, freedom of movement
and open borders, but hasn’t actually sat down to
write it yet. His motifs and subject matter have all
been Icelandic history and mythology, but he says
he’d like to channel what he’s been researching for
his thesis into a more political vein for his paintings.
He says of his long term goal: “Well, the big am-
bition for me is to paint a—this is pretentious—but I
just want to paint a masterpiece. That’s the thing I’m
sort of burning for.” When asked what “masterpiece”
means in this regard, he laughs and says: “Wow, a
masterpiece... It’s just being very... I can’t define mas-
terpiece, but just painting something I feel like I’ve
managed something, or did something really... yeah,
did something that I’m very pleased with.”
That goal seems easy enough to attain, but cre-
ative people are a notoriously critical lot. He some-
times feels pleased with what he’s done. “But I’m
always comparing it to the paintings I love the most
and I come up quite short every time.” The ultimate,
ultimate goal is to be able to look over all his work
as an old man with lucidity and be satisfied that he’s
created his masterpiece, however that ends up being
defined.
“I don’t know, I’m
more into Grýla eating
children”