Artist Interview: Otto
While the University of St Andrews may not offer practical studies in the fine arts, the arts are flourishing in this small town. The Art Society met with a variety of different artists over the current semester, hailing from around the world and working across a wide span of mediums. Our hope with these interviews was simply to meet artists around town, get a closer look at their work, and talk about where they may end up and what they think about art. These interviews are boundless in their subject scope, and we hope you find some inspiration from them if you are an artist yourself (in the broadest sense of the term). After all, it is in community, rather than isolation, where some of the best inspiration can be found.
-Sarah Allen, Co-President of the Art Society
Sarah: Welcome to this interview! I’m Sarah, a co-President of the Art Society, and I’ll be interviewing Otto. Tell us a bit about yourself, Otto.
Otto: Hi, I’m Otto. I’m a 4th year ecology undergrad here. I grew up in the states but my whole family has moved to Norwich to be closer to friends and family in South Africa. I’m a big fan of nature and music, so you may bump into me at events for societies like RockSoc.
S: As a society, our main aim is addressing the lack of fine art taught at St Andrews and bringing art into the community in other ways. What has your artistic experience been like at St Andrews thus far, and what artistic goals do you have for the rest of your time here?
O: It has been an odd one. I’ve been doing art for my whole life, and I used to make a bit of money doing commissions and selling t-shirts. Not a lot, but some. Here, though, I can’t do anything of the sort due to being on a student visa. I wish I could say that hasn’t affected things, but I love to make art gifts for my friends, and they want to be nice and pay me back -but they can’t.
I quite like the artistic social scene – I have a lot of artist friends and even people who don’t consider themselves artists have a lot of knowledge and appreciation for it. I just wish there were more centralised spaces for doing art, like a university studio (I desperately want some kind of metalworking / tool shop / maker space). Right now, I’m just sat on my flat kitchen floor and I think it’s messing up my back.
S: The space for creating is abysmal at this University, and we hope to change that! A good space is vital for creation, I think – and for your back. Beyond the kitchen floor, tell us a bit about your own artistic process.
O: I make art super erratically with no planning. I guess I tend to think visually - like I “see” sounds - so coherent thoughts can kind of become motifs. I can do plenty of processing without the artistic element but I forget things if I don’t note them down in some way, so I guess my art is a way to stop re-thinking the same thought over and over again. Sometimes I have to paint or draw so I stop thinking about, I dunno, a weird dream I had, instead of working on an essay.
S: It’s hard to balance that work-art balance as a uni student. Often, creating feels almost like transgression of a kind; something you’d get in trouble for. Tell us about art as transgression, or art in a school environment.
O: I think art can be a transgression or an act against something if that is its intention. It doesn’t have to always be the case. It’s kind of a language of its own, a bit more universally translatable than written or spoken language, but still highly dependent on its creator and the culture it exists within. I don’t see my art as necessarily transgressive, it’s just my thoughts, but based on how adults would react to the drawings I made as a kid, other people are interpreting it as weird and horrific.
As for schools restricting creativity, it’s not an inherent problem, but it definitely is one. Some of my teachers would push me to draw realistically while others actually encouraged me to embrace surrealist drawing techniques like exquisite corpse, unconscious drawing, and use of tarot. It really depends on the teacher and what kind of pedagogy they subscribe to. The thing I find kind of sad is when people enjoy doing something but avoid doing it because their teacher, or some other authority figure, critiqued them too hard. I was a pretty shy kid, so I’m honestly pretty surprised I didn’t give up on art. It’s taken a lot of practice to work in synchrony with aspects affecting how I make art, like shaky hands, rather than considering them issues I need to unlearn.
S: It is an uphill battle to hold on to art, and your personal style, especially as a child in school. What do you think about realism in art, versus your own style?
O: Different courses for different horses. I personally find realistic art, while technically impressive, to be pretty bland and uninspiring. At the same time I also understand everyone has entirely different tastes in what they find visually intriguing, so some people probably love realistic stuff on more than a logical level. Because of that I think stuff like “talent” and “creativity” are pretty hard to define, especially when you consider skill – I was not born painting the stuff I do today, I just kept at it for years and I learned. I think the important thing in art is that the artist is, in some way, happy with their piece. Maybe it felt good to make, maybe it ended up looking cool, maybe you met up with friends to do art together and you didn’t make anything impressive but you had a lovely time anyways.
S: It seems like you approach art and creation with quite a free spirit, and this is admirable. What would you say are the pros of approaching more freely, rather than planning it out?
O: I honestly don’t know if I’d get anything done if I planned it out. I’d probably get bored if one piece of art took too long to make. It’s also a nice way to work without pressure, since my techniques mean that if I mess up and can’t work with the mistake, I’ve got to restart the whole piece. That hurts a lot less when you’re only losing an hour of work instead of ten.
‘johnny in the garden’ (2022)
S: Let’s dive into a specific artwork of yours. Tell me about this enchanting piece.
O: ‘Johnny in the garden’ is one of (I think?) four portraits of real people that I’ve done, the other being the forest spirit pieces. That one is of my boyfriend, with motifs I associate with him. I wanted to create something kind of quiet and mysterious and including cacti and a rat skull without it seeming spiky and aggressive. It’s very much trying to encapsulate the desert at night in a person.
The techniques in it are the same I use as all of my currently-posted traditional art. I paint with acrylics on a mix of paper, printer paper, and cardboard. I then cut out the pieces and arrange them in a way I like before I glue everything down. Then I go over with pen and coloured pencil. I find this process really contributes to working quickly and cutting out any monotony, since I change the tools I’m using and the location I’m working in multiple times.
S: Tell me more about this mixed media approach. Did you always work like this, or did you start with a singular medium?
O: I started with whatever was most convenient, which was school supplies. Lined paper, pencil, ballpoint pen. Only later I started doing digital stuff. Painting I did in art class, but I didn’t really enjoy it, it felt like I could never achieve the fine detail I wanted. At some point I realised that all these different media had parts I liked and parts I found annoying, and maybe I could make things more fun by doing mixed media in which every individual part is done with the medium I think is best. Paint’s great for covering large areas and for texture but it feels like a blunt instrument. Pencil’s good for fine details and shading but I wouldn’t want to do too many whole pieces in it - I’d probably get carpal tunnel syndrome. Digital is great for the most complex stuff (since I can zoom in) and the boldest colours, but it’s pretty wretched for texture and shading. Mixed media means I can use media for what I enjoy the most and not have to worry about the less fun parts.
S: Digital is definitely a hard medium for me to work with, I get that. In this digital age, where there is an infinite amount of art being produced on social media, it seems impossible to create something that stands out. How do you pull people in? Or is social media less a place to pull people in and sell, and more just a personal portfolio?
O: While I’ve mentioned selling art before I moved out of the states, it wasn’t really my goal. I guess I think of it like how people make text posts of whatever weird things they’re thinking of. It’s a way to get a thought out of your head, and from there you can share it to see if anyone else relates. If someone wants to buy it, sure, that’s a cool feeling, but I wasn’t fussed about not getting sales. I suppose I could do that since I’d be making enough money from other jobs that I didn’t feel like I had to monetise every skill I had. If I tried to monetise my stuff more, I think it would make me miserable. I paint when I’m in the mood to paint, which isn’t the best for making dough.
I guess by extension of that I don’t really try to pull people in. I’m just throwing stuff at the wall because it’s fun to do that, and anything sticking is a by-product of that.
S: Where do you see art taking you in the future?
O: Hard to say. Based on how it’s going, I’m going to be living in an apartment absolutely covered in my art and paper scraps and it’s going to smell of permanent marker. It may end up being the case that some of my art ends up being gifted, sold, or displayed, but who can say?
S: For you, is art more of an observational activity, or more within the realm of self-reflection?
O: It’s both. How you interpret the world depends on who you are, so observational activities aren’t separate from self-reflection.
‘?’ (2022)
S: Do you think art needs to have a moral purpose? Or is it just art for art’s sake?
O: Art for art’s sake is kind of a moral purpose. It’s like look, I’m doing this thing because I want to and not necessarily because it’ll make me a lot of money, and that thing is self-expression. That’s pretty rebellious. The way we’ve set up society would much rather you stop painting cool things and spend more time working minimum wage at Starbucks.
S: Thank you for your wonderfully thought-out answers. One last fun question – who are some of your artistic inspirations?
O: Francis Bacon, Mason Lindroth, Rae Klein, Julia Soboleva, Mortis Ghost, Samantha Hensley, Jean Dubuffet, Zdzisław Beksiński.
S: Thank you so much for interviewing with the Art Society. It was a pleasure to hear from you about art. Any final thoughts for the people?
O: To people out there who enjoy art but worry they’re not good enough: keep doing what you want to, even if you never show it to anyone. Art’s for you.