Erik Ødegaard - Artist Bio

Pdf version of Ødegaard Bio

From his birth in Oslo, Norway (11.28.69), Erik Ødegaard has traveled a winding road. From an early age he was surrounded by art. As a youngster he watched his great grandmother uncover a 17th-century painting by ancient relative Tidemann Eriksson Ødegaard as she stripped away centuries of paint from a door in the family cabin in Valdres, Norway. The painting, a landscape, depicted houses nestled amongst trees. Ødegaard’s grandfather, Ole, was a major patron of artist Oddvar Barstad, a figurative modernist school painter. Barstad’s biblical and folk-story paintings and murals, as well as landscapes were commissioned in the surrounding town’s churches, libraries and government buildings. His talent extended to wood sculptures and hand colored relief carvings of farm motifs and Biblical scenes.

Barstad was a regular feature in the Ødegaard household and the young Erik vividly recalls his paintings of forests, elves and fairytale scenes. “He brought the imaginary world of folktales and myths into my vision,” Ødegaard remembers thinking. And with that he knew that he, too, wanted to be an artist. Irrepressibly drawing and sketching from an early age, Ødegaard’s talent became evident and soon Barstad agreed to take on the 11-year-old as a student.

Ødegaard’s desire to produce art never left him as he ventured into other arenas. As a result of his endless sketching, his talent always found its way to the surface. At the University of Tromso, Ødegaard, studied philosophy and literature. The world within books and the visions of philosophers became a source for his images. He was especially inspired by the classic figures of Cervantes, Don Quixote, Dostoevsky’s, Raskolnikov and the philosophy of Sartre and Camus.

While there, he was worked as an illustrator for student newspaper, creating the covers for the monthly publication. Later he pursued varied professions, from lumberjacking to fishing to teaching.

Even while working on a fishing vessel, at the end of hard days work, Ødegaard could be found down in the pantry drawing and painting the day’s catch.

After several years of these adventures and with the financial support of his grandfather, Ødegaard pursued his boyhood dream of becoming a professional artist. He left his native Norway for the United States to attend the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, graduating with a BFA in 2000.

Ødegaard now lives and works in a converted World War II shipyard in East Oakland, California—one of the harshest; some would say “ugliest” parts of the country. His home, a warehouse comprising over 100 artists’ live/work spaces, is surrounded by an unscripted scattering of industrial buildings, abandoned train tracks, and misplaced cars and shopping carts.
His response to this world now takes the form of “GhettoScapes.”

“I’m part of this rough, tough, down-and-out neighborhood on the fringe of society… and at the same time, I am also an outsider, an alien in an alien landscape,” says Ødegaard. It is, perhaps, this sense of being in the place but not of the place that gives the artist such a unique perspective on his subject matter.

“There are enormous areas of industrial space that exist just to support the glamour and glitz of shopping malls and a consumer society. Industrial wastelands are not considered attractive and few of us have ever stopped to contemplate them,” he notes.
Ødegaard’s “GhettoScapes” compel us to do just that. They could be interpreted as a sad statement on the excesses and waste of the world today, but he does not necessarily see them as such. They are vignettes of a life that very few encounter or could possibly imagine.

Ødegaard finds things in his surroundings that are attractive to him, no matter how dismal the environment may seem. He talks with passion about that lone bright color that someone painted on a wall surrounded by vast areas of industrial grays. He sees the moments of harmony and composition that surround us, but that we fail to see because we judge the scene and turn away from it.

In addition to viewing his “GhettoScapes” as “underdog landscapes” with a dark, comedic aspect, he sees them as reminiscent of Bruegel’s 14th-century village scenes, imbued with the pathos of a hardscrabble existence. However, void of people, these unsettling landscapes become ours. We are obliged to contemplate the human condition by baldly facing our own debris. How did we end up here? How do we get by?

This is not to say that Ødegaard’s intentions are strictly dour and philosophical. Looking at the painting “I Used to Have a Lawn,” he asks, “What was this guy thinking when he put that lawnmower on the top of his van? You know, it took amazing effort to get it up there, and how did he get it to stay put?”

Likewise, in “Flat Bed Motor Home,” Ødegaard salutes the anonymous ingenuity of an indomitable homesteader. “How industrious and determined this individual must be to have, somehow, hoisted an old truck camper onto a flatbed truck and then complete the scene with a patio tent,” he remarks with genuine admiration.

Human resourcefulness takes a further humorous turn in “Brothel Camper.” The artist tells the story of the tenants who went on vacation and, upon returning, discovered that their campervan had been turned into a busy brothel.

In the rich teal tones of sky, the umber of a crunched and rusting fender, the stark white abutments of an overpass, and the painterly play of light on a barren warehouse, Ødegaard paints his subjects without apology. They are naked in his gaze, a hauntingly accurate vision of contemporary life in the world of ”have-nots”.