Iva Troj – Circle Foundation for the Arts

What themes does your work involve?

The underlying stories, especially the conflicts, are much more interesting to me than mere portraiture. I want to know what’s going on, which is why I have always been interested in research. When I went back to university for a second BA and a Master's, I chose software design, philosophy, and cognitive science rather than fine art, because science fascinates me. My themes are almost always about taking things apart and putting them back together and for that you need to look outside yourself.

Describe your creative process.

I sketch a lot before starting a piece. It's an ongoing thing. The painting technique I mostly use resembles the Flemish method of layering thin veneers of paint between layers of varnish. I am no fan of white canvases so I often prepare my canvases in advance either using pastels and ink or just diluted acrylics. After the underpainting is done I paint a lighter layer with acrylics and finish with a couple of thicker layers using oils, occasionally acrylics, and sometimes gold leaf and ink.

What influences your work? What inspires you? Why do you make art?

Traditional elements are central to my body of work. It’s not a need to keep the style ”traditional”, but the way I speak. I grew up in a communist country. We sang songs about machines' superiority to man and praised modernity while destroying nature and killing creativity and the human spirit with it. At the same time, my summers were spent in the mountains with my grandmother who had hanging gardens, thousand stories and no TV. My head is full of dichotomies. Art is how I make sense of it all.

What is good art? What makes a piece of art great?

There are two inseparable aspects of the art process that really need to coexist and function together - ideology and skill. Ideology without skill is silly and skill without ideology is empty. The day you find a way to get those two working as a whole is the day you become an artist. And I'm allergic to self-indulgent art. Do we really need one more artist who is only looking to himself for answers? We have a patriarchy to dismantle and a world to save. You can't do that looking at your navel.

What is the role of the artist today?

What is the role of the human today? There is a saying in my family: "If you don't have food on your table, you have one problem. If you have food on your table, you have thousand problems." Artists should be our culture's caretakers and not self-serving, standing on the top of the hill looking down monarchs. We have to stop following the cult of the individual s.c. "genius". It's the ecology of talent that raises us so we need to nurture it. The art industry has killed most of it already.