Carsten Kruse talks to us about his unique paintings on structures such as trams, houses, cars and other odd things all over Germany…
Kruse is a German artist based in Heidelberg and he is certainly a man of many talents; hand painting images on cans, recycled scrap materials and canvas with monster and fish style paintings.
The energetic artist has been painting on canvas since 1990, with his first exhibition held in Heidelberg a year later for a local computer company. He began painting houses in 2002 and trams in 2003, taking 6 weeks to complete this latter project.
As a child, Kruse explains that he was always painting and no-one could stop him from decorating the furniture and even the walls in his parents’ house! He went onto draw with water-resistant pens on school property, then his own bike, his own car as well as his friends’ cars and so on.
Kruse is now employed by companies to construct a marketing concept which in turn becomes his artwork. An example of this is Kruse’s work on Aqualand in Cologne which included hand painting a building wall and a tram. He tells me that many projects are determined by his own imagination but others want to show a strong corporate identity, and one example of this is the B5-Solar company in Berlin.
He states that essential skills for working in the arts industry include “talent, courage and an instinct for business”, and that having “maximum freedom” is the best thing about his job… “I can do what ever I want. Nobody cares about my hair cut. I get money for all the crazy ideas in my head”. However, Kruse doesn’t take kindly to criticism and struggles if he does not have a big project in sight.
I ask what advice he could offer to others wanting to pursue a career as an artist and he says that “not developing a big interest in too much money or luxury is essential as most artists I know are poor”. He recommends networking to get noticed although admits to hating this side to the art industry.
This summer Kruse will be producing T-shirts that will be available online, and for this he founded a company in Stuttgart and the prototypes are in production now.
To see more of this unique colourful array of work, go to Kruse’s website at:
http://www.ck-paintings.de/
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