Klaus Nordby's Militantly Dull Homepage:

Painting

Nothing to show, nothing to say

I do not want to write anything here about my own painting. Heed Nordby's Dictum: "Paintings, like children, should be seen and not heard." Time will show — stay tuned.

But I can say that, technically, I paint in oil on board — more precisely, I paint in pure glazed oils, with not a gram of opaques used anywhere. And I paint on a perfectly smoothed board, with not a grain of physical surface texture in sight. Yes, this way of working is devilishly difficult and slow. But no, I am not a masochist: this is the only technique which lets me fully recreate how I "see" the world.

Loves and Hates

Being a fledgling painter myself, I am naturally fond of some painters. My favorites form a rather eclectic group: Vermeer, Ruisdael, Bouguereau, Waterhouse, Alma-Tadema, Bierstadt, Parrish and Frazetta.

I do not consider so-called "modern art" to be art at all. At best, it is simply agreeable wall decoration — at worst, it is pure nihilism and an offensive affront to all human values. Creatures like Kandinsky, Mondrian and Pollock are not painters in any meaningful sense, with Picasso, Klee and Matisse being unsanitary borderline cases. They were not "innovators" — they were destroyers of the Art of Painting. Due to these creatures — and the estheticians who paved the way for them and the critics who fawned over them — the very words "painting" and "painter" and "art" have long ago ceased to have any objective meaning: when anything can be art — then nothing is art.