Orson Kartt
Orson Kartt's eCatalogue
"So when words fail, as they often do, I make art, because being is a doing word.” - Orson Kartt
Orson Kartt inherently believes that he has always been an artist, since he was first taught how to draw at the age of seven in his school playing field. However, it was not until the age of eleven that his creativity and love of drawing was tarnished when his art teacher confirmed he ‘was doing it all wrong.’ Kartt has commented that he “didn’t dare do anything really creative again until [he] was in [his] early 20’s.” Kartt attended art school at the age of twenty-five, and it was then that he began to reignite his love of creating and developing art work.
"I was taught that there is no such thing as art, just artists. As an artist my view is that art is about expressing the experience of being human.
Being human, is often shaped, coloured and shaded by the light gleaned from our ever present media.
Being an artist is I believe, about seeing… things in the world around us and seeing things in the mind’s eye. Asking questions, so the work becomes an observation of the universe we live in. Both the physical one around us and the internal one which is always trying to make some sense of it all.” In his piece, ‘Rust never sleeps,’ the composition and subject matter came about due to loving the quality of the material. “The texture, the multitude of colour and sense of warmth that sometimes happens when steel oxidizes and changes from being a strong supportive material. This beauty is so often overlooked in so many aspects of our lives.”
The subject of death is a recurring theme in Kartt’s vocabulary. He states that,
“science tells us that the nature of our lives are finite. My personal countdown was calculated using family and personal health records and lifestyle history. It is quite shocking to be presented with this data, a bit scary and yet strangely liberating . It is a very real, bitter/sweet perspective. A confrontation of reality.”
Kartt’s works have been described as post iconic, therefore Dadaist and Surrealist. In answer to this, Kartt would say, “Art can be used as a tool to confront reality I like to think I work in this way.”
