Andrej Krivda - Biography
Vital biographic data
Shoe size: 44
Blood pressure: systolic 120 / diastolic 80
Digestion: on the fast side
Favourite magazine: Elvis Monthly
Email: contact at krivda.com
As you may have guessed this is not going to be your traditional curriculum. The entire site is a vehicle to my musings on life and art. You have been warned, read at your own peril!
How does one become a painter? The starting point my artistic career was, as it is probably in most of cases, a dream. In November 2007 just one day from another I woke up and decided to start painting. Was it the call of subconsciousness or "Immaculate Conception" by the divine hand? I do not know but here I am ...
Embracing the digital age ...
I believe that the birth of the idea to paint the vertical lines must have come from my encounter with some of very first computer viruses. In the old days when the computer monitors were still black and letters green I saw a computer virus attacking a text editor with the green letters falling in vertical lines to the bottom of the screen until only glowing black screen remained. It was a fascinating experience.
From purely visual point of view I have to acknowledge my predecessors Gene Davis and Barnett Newman. They created, if I may borrow the terminology from the classical music, duets and trios and in the case of Gene Davis perhaps even septets and octets. I, on the other hand, wanted to create symphonies, with much greater variability in colour, width and distribution of individual vertical lines. Using computer as a painting tool, in the same way as other artists are using brush, I hope that I was able to create more subtle, sophisticated colour play. On my canvas I have approximately 1000 vertical lines to paint, and for each line I can select two millions colours from my digital palette - this gives me a completely different set of options compared with traditional "analog" painting. These images are not generated by a computer, they are a result of endless search for a "good" pattern which at least to my eye works well harmonically and compositionally. Usually only 1-2% of all patterns actually make it into my final selection.
Being engineer with mathematical background I think I need a solid framework upon which I can work and in my case these are the vertical lines. As an artist I would like to be totally free and this freedom is then reflected in the horizontal direction where I permit myself to go wild. The fact that you are restricted in one (vertical) direction does not imply that you are restricted at all. This artificially introduced limitation forces you to be even more creative in another (horizontal) direction.
As mentioned above I prefer subtlety and gentle play of colours working together in harmony. A reflection of my personality? Perhaps, that is why almost transcendental work of Giorgio Morandi addresses me much more than the output of some contemporary industrial art factories which employ dozens of workers to create art products. I feel that the personal touch of an artist is still very important in the act of creation. And although I use a computer to create my works to make them more human I am using paint mixed with my own DNA in the form of a short piece of hair or a tiny drop of blood to sign my creations. In this way I hope to not only to prevent forgeries after all DNA is a unique signature but also to hand out a piece of myself so that I am forever fused with my paintings and art lovers admiring my work.
At the end apologies to all enthusiasts - the images are of relatively low resolution to prevent direct copying of my work. Feel free to contact me to obtain the limited edition prints.
For Cancers life, love and art goes through the stomach
Bellyful + two glasses of wine, Nirvana #25 :-)
And for the die-hard data collectors a few more details.
I was born in a small country town Humenne, Slovakia where, sometimes I was under this impression, the only culture was vodka drinking culture.
Got my MSc degree at the Technical University in Kosice, Slovakia and PhD degree at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. My worst memories of Holland was horizontally falling rain, my best were the local jewels of The Gemeentemuseum in den Haag with a wonderful Mondrian collection, The Stedelijk museum of modern art in Amsterdam and the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in Hoge Veluwe National Park. If you want to know more about the Dutch then read The Undutchables by Colin White and Laurie Boucke.
After the studies I worked for one year at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. I just could not believe how dark can get there in winter, brrrr.
Another four years of my life I lived in Brisbane - fabulous time devoted (in addition to my work) to studying Fellini, Bergman, Godard, Antonioni, Kurosawa and Almodovar with my friends Robert, Marc and Stewart in a local Les Mistons cine club and extensively reading works of Hemingway, Bukowski, Brautigan and many others.
But as the Aussies say "Jobs, jobs, jobs" in 2001 I moved to Switzerland - the land of watches, chocolate, and knives - where I trotted out my first steps in the art world.