Erik Creutziger: "My inner drive is so strong that I cannot imagine life without painting"

What is the most important thing you want to teach your students?

My primary aim is to help all students find their own painterly expression and identify their individual strengths, so that they can focus on developing them further. It is also important to me to teach the fundamentals of painting, such as the significance of colour and light, as well as the material qualities of paint. Equally important is the understanding that developing as a painter requires an immense amount of work. There are no shortcuts.

Why do you paint?

I paint because it is my way of expressing myself, and because my inner drive is so strong that I cannot imagine life without painting. When I paint, everything around me disappears. Painting is the supreme art form of the visual arts: it is intuitive, poetic, offers infinite combinations of colour, and its direct, physical presence cannot be replaced.

Whose student would you have liked to be?

Edvard Munch’s. There would have been much to learn from his use of colour and painterly expression. We are also connected by strong colours, melancholy, and a sense of narrative.

Where do you find inspiration for your painting?

I am most often inspired by things I see and experience in everyday life. These can be meaningful experiences as well as sudden impulses. Literature, theatre, and film are also important sources of inspiration. I am fascinated by the mixing of different levels of reality, between lived experience and imagination. Sometimes my ideas are also connected to places I dream of travelling to, or to a longing for another reality.

Erik Creutziger

• Painter, Master of Fine Arts
• MFA, Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2013
  Painter, Free Art School, 2007
• Born 1982, Helsinki
• Principal teacher, third year