“From the outset 20 years ago, Hirst was always the brilliant ideas man: catch a tiger shark and suspend it in formaldehyde; pin a thousand butterflies to a canvas in the shape of a stain glass window; decorate a real human skull with £14m worth of the finest diamonds. No problem.
So why is he standing in his garden shed, brush in hand, struggling to create another skull in old-fashioned oil paint, rather than modern uber-bling?
As ever with Hirst, death plays a major part in the reasoning.
“You get to an age when you realise you have more time behind you than you have in front of you” he says.
“It dawns on you that you’re not immortal”.
He suggests that the act of painting alone provides a more satisfying and peaceful means of artistic expression than overseeing a production line of luxuries for the super-rich. ”
“Later this month, 25 Hirst works will hang alongside Rembrandts, Poussins and Titians in the Wallace Collection in London.
It will be a debut exhibition for an artist who has shown in galleries from LA to the Ukraine.
He’s resigned to the probable response from art critics. “Oh, they’re going to hate them. Hate them.” he says.
“People are not shocked by animals in formaldehyde any more, but they’re shocked that you’re picking up a brush and a canvas and going backwards”.
As a teenage student in Leeds, he dreamed of being a great painter. But then he discovered Francis Bacon and was overawed, cowed into submission.
“He seemed to have cornered the market,” Hirst says. So he gave up and turned his mind to high-concept art.
Since then, he has always wanted his occupation listed as painter rather than artist.
All his heroes were “the messy painters like Goya and Soutine”, he says. He loved the idea of Turner strapped to the mast of a ship, madly capturing a swirling sunset over the sea.
But the 44-year-old father of three says his biggest ambition these days is to earn the respect of the next generation of young artists.
“I just want kids to think ‘that Damien Hirst, he was really cool.’”
via BBC NEWS et Ugly Blog
Mon, Oct 19, 2009
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