When I paint, my primary intention is to communicate. Art is a form of communication like any other, which should not require explanation or excuse. I always have in mind paintings which anyone can understand without having to be told they are art or why they are art - this is fundamental to how I paint.
Paintings going back thousands of years in caves and on rocks throughout the world can be seen and understood millenia after their creators and cultures have vanished, with visual languages that are innate to human beings. My aim is the same: to take in what I see and translate it internally before renedering that translation with paint on canvas. In this way I create art that need not be literal, but will always be understandable, regardless of the fashions of the time.
Tamor Kriwaczek was born in London in 1972. His initial interest in art came at the age of 14 when, having shown some facility in drawing, he was taken to the old Tate Gallery in London (now Tate Britain), where he first encountered the works of Piet Mondrain and Salvador Dalí. On returning home, he took his brother's oil paints and created his first paintings. What was obvious to him at that time was that oil paint was a medium that he understood, and loved. Soon after, he happened upon an exhibition of paintings by Frank Auerbach. This was the moment that solidified his future. Oil paint, as a medium, interested him more that any other aspect of art creation, and it was clear to him having seen the works of Auerbach, that a painter was what he was, and would always be.
He left school at 18 and briefly attended Camberwell College of Art. It was the early 1990's and conceptual art, with the rise of the YBA's (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin etc.), had blown a harsh wind through all the art schools. So he resolved to tutor himself, attending life drawing classes and visiting the National Gallery and commercial galleries in London weekly, to draw and study every painting he could find, working his way through many styles until he resolved his own way of working and interpreting the world around him.
But painting was not his only artistic outlet. He became proficient in computer programming, creating an online artwork called One Million Minds, which he used to ask questions of those taking part which were then analized to create a unique series of computer generated abstract portraits. Added to this, he has written stories about conceptual art, culminating in the idea of the recipe as a work of art in its own right, whereby the artwork need not be created by the artist at all, but the design and idea of which is enough for others to use to make the art, thereby taking conceptual art one stage further away from the traditional format of artist rendering art. But painting is and will always be his first love.
