Art & Creativity Quote by Odd Nerdrum

Nerdrum’s line is a shot across the bow at the modern compulsion to narrate, justify, and brand the self. The insistence that you “cannot sit down and write about your own paintings” isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-alibi: artist statements, theories, and autobiographical gloss can become a way of not making the thing. He frames painting as the one arena where feeling is forced into consequence. Words can endlessly qualify; paint commits.

The subtext is also defensive, and revealing. Nerdrum has long positioned himself against contemporary art’s managerial language: the grant-speak, the curatorial essay, the conceptual scaffolding that often arrives before the work. By declaring painting “the only way” to express what you really feel, he rejects the idea that meaning is primarily produced in discourse. He’s arguing for a hierarchy: craft and image first, explanation last (if at all). That stance doubles as a claim to authenticity in a culture that increasingly mistakes commentary for creation.

There’s a tactical humility here, too. Writing about your own work turns you into your own critic, publicist, and interpreter, collapsing roles that are usually in productive tension. Nerdrum wants the painting to bear the emotional load without a translator. The rhetorical punch comes from its bluntness: a closed door, a single route. It’s not just advice; it’s a dare to stop performing insight and return to the messy, physical labor where feeling has to survive contact with the canvas.