Artbeat
Andrea Sarcani meets Costin Craioveanu

June/July 2005

Imagine a painter who one morning says he’s broke, loads a few pictures into his car, and who that afternoon returns home without them, but a little richer. This isn’t our usual image of an artist. Costin Craioveanu is an exception from the precious attitudes of many artists, even very young ones. His work is in demand and he’s one of the few Romanian artists who manages to make a living from painting.

He comes from a family of artists, and his childhood and adolescence were spent in the workshop of his father, well-known sculptor Nicolae Craioveanu, making chandeliers, candelabras, icons and jewellery, long before attending the faculty of painting at Luceafarul University. He recalls with humour and light irony the stuffy and old-fashioned courses at the faculty. “There were days when they would put a brick under our noses and we were left to contemplate it for hours on end and to draw it. It seemed to me to be both so anachronistic and senseless. Man had landed on the moon thirty years previously and there I was sitting in front of a brick for four hours.”
Access to galleries before graduating was no easy matter: “To rent a space to show my work, I spent years as a car salesman. I invested everything I earned in art.”

Asked about the possibility of a resemblance with Andy Warhol in that he uses film stars as models, he replies: “Unlike him, I paint those portaits. Sometimes, for a portrait of Marilyn Monroe I’ll work for ten hours. Andy Warhol spent at most ten minutes to print an image on canvas. Probably that’s not the only difference between me and Andy Warhol,” says Craioveanu, with a smile.

Without doubt, in the 21st century we are no longer fascinated by a painting depicting a sunflower. Ways of working have changed radically, as have materials and the whole structure of society. “If van Gogh had been a contemporary of Angelina Jolie, I’m sure he would have chosen her as a model,” he says, half serious, half joking. The modern world is dynamic; everything changes quickly, but his temperament and vision of the world allows him to adapt and to understand the sense. “I can’t keep a picture in the workshop more than a few weeks. If it doesn’t sell in this period, I rub it out and paint another: it means it was not successful with the public.”
In his many trips around the world, Costin Craioveanu was impressed by South Korea. He remembers the correctness, seriousness and work ethic of the people he met there.

At 30 years of age, asked to think of an ideal, Costin Craioveanu says he would like to be the bestselling Romanian artist and to stay with his wife all his life. One of the most pleasant and unusual events in his life concerns his wife, and the way they met four years ago.

“I found myself in a house music club, and had on me an icon which I’d brought from one of my exhibitions. When I caught sight of her, I went up to her and offered her the icon. Several days later she asked to see me, we met and since then have been together.”

He believes his painting affects the public for two reasons: one is that he usually depicts celebrities, people with beautiful, cheerful, expressive faces, who are alluring to the eye, people with personality who have the courage to step out from anonymity. “It’s one thing to see a smiling Isabelle Adjani on your living-room wall when you wake up, or Charlie Chaplin, and it’s another to see some abstraction or ashen landscape, with all due respect to my colleagues, as everyone is free to choose their own path. The second reason for my success is that I work a lot and sell cheap. I do 50-100 pictures per month. As long as the average Romanian earns 5 million lei per month, I can’t ask 1,000 euros for a painting, no matter how wonderful it is. As my father says, artists are vain, they work for an hour and get paid for a year. They believe what they do is unique and they pose as misunderstood geniuses. I’m happy that my work increasingly ends up in the homes of Romanians.”

More on Costin Craioveanu can be found at www.craioveanu.net