Interview with Ur Kasin
Q. Welcome to u1 gallery. We are so grateful to be able to interview you. We can never thank you enough. Could you introduce yourself and your works? How did you begin creating art?
A. My name is Ur Kasin. I was born in 98' in Bucharest, Romania. It's the same city I grew up in and the same city I live and work. I don't remember how I began creating art, it was a long time ago. Probably drawing on desks at school.
Actually, I painted the cat once and it was definitely before school, but she was NOT happy.
Q. Could you describe one artwork or series from your oeuvre that you feel it was pivotal in your career?
A. The Graphite Period. It's called that because all I knew then was to draw with graphite on paper. I was 19 and although I'd already made hundreds of works, none was for myself. I was totally drained so one day I just said f it and went my way.
Q. Could you talk about the process of creating and the way of expressing your work?
A. The process of creating in my case is always changing, But as a rule of thumb, I always go from small to big. The painting begins once the color palette is chosen, the color palette gets chosen once the contrasts are right, and this only happens after multiple charcoal drawings, but each charcoal drawing requires multiple sketches and so on.
The funny thing is that although a painting should be the final form of long thought, I sometimes feel like the sketches or the charcoal drawings express way more than the painting for witch the drawings were made.
Q. Are there any artists or works that have influenced you?
A. YES! And they are a lot! And not just visual artists. Anegrete Solteau, Corneliu Baba, Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Mser (it's a dude who does graffiti in Bucharest), Cy Twombly, Oscar Niemeyer, etc.
I've made a special 'Thanks' page for most of them somewhere on the website. I say most because there's definitely more than one that I've missed.
Q. Where do you get the inspiration for your work?
A. Sometimes, inspiration feels like an infinite staircase, you need to have where to step to go a little higher. So I kinda take everything that I know and make a soup out of it. Maybe I'll take a part of a magazine, with a corner of my friend's kitchen, with a hand of a sculpture I saw a few years ago and POOF that's the inspiration for a painting. The next time I'll add a little more, and then a little more on top of that, and before realizing it, I was mixing hundreds of thoughts on the same canvas. Inspiration is closely tied to practice btw.
Q. What do you hope that the audience takes away from your art?
A. I hope there's gonna be someone out there that sees my art and feels inspired by it, in any way, shape, or form. I would love to hear that they like it, but even 'c'mon man I could do that, I should start drawing' is good enough for me!
Q. What is your dream project? Could you tell us your plans and aspirations as an artist?
A. Now that you ask, I never really thought about it. I'm working on a lot of stuff right now and it would be awesome one day to combine everything in a BIG exhibition, but I try to take things step by step and enjoy the process as much as I can. Time flies, you know?
