Are pigs just an accessory? Or can they be your backbone of strength? Is it important to be creative, to be able to create?
I was a kid who wanted to draw pictures, I loved drawing pictures — I remember my mum telling me that to have a picture of her and her granddad, I needed to make pictures.
Then the art and art history teachers told me: Well, this really looks like a picture of a painting. That wasn’t something that anybody would have said. I remember, I was nine, 10 and 11. So I just went around painting pictures for everybody and I just kept painting pictures. It really came out of me. And I remember this one teacher, you know, somebody who didn’t want to listen to my ideas, they weren’t listening.
And that’s really what inspired me to be creative.
It had nothing do with pigmentation. It had something to do with thinking in terms of colour. When I wanted to go to bed, I’d just imagine a white colour around me, as if I was living in a black and white movie. I would be going to bed thinking to myself, “Well, this is a white colour, it’ll be black when I wake up.” And that was my creative way to deal with things.
PIGS RULED
When did you become interested in drawing, did you start writing out a story or drawing at that point? I know you weren’t an artist as a kid or any other kind of art…
I started drawing at a young age, I was six years old. The idea of drawing was something that I was very keen on since I was a kid. You see, everybody draws, and everybody loves to draw, but it depends on how you draw something. It has to be something that you can actually see or feel a real emotion. When I was a kid I never thought I should draw pictures, I thought I was just, as you say, a normal kid. And as it turned out, I wasn’t. I remember when I was four or five I started drawing pictures and writing stories about my drawings and writing, and I started with animals. And I don’t know, maybe because I was a kid, I just felt I had to show how my drawings could look in the books. And since then, I went through different areas of drawing, in my own way, not quite the same way but different enough.
Did it change that you