Six naive questions answered by Purvītis Prize winners Katrīna Neiburga, Kristaps Ģelzis, Andris Eglītis and Miķelis Fišers.

What has changed since you received the Purvītis Prize?

Neiburga: I have grown older, and I have had another son.

Eglītis: The political situation in the world has become considerably more worrying. My own life is changing all the time, but I have not observed that receiving the Purvītis Prize specifically triggered any major turning point.

Ģelzis: I have coined the term “creative compromise” for myself. I even named my car Purvītis. To keep my hands closer to the daily grind.

Fišers: It is much harder to identify myself as a representative of the counterculture. I mean self-identification. But if that is the case, what is this mainstream now? It’s some kind of insanity. Because of this, I am a bit confused.

By the way, what do you think of Purvītis himself?

Neiburga: I don’t think anything at the moment.

Eglītis: By the way – he’s not bad. He had clear goals and a vision, but at the same time remained in a state of constant search. Undoubtedly, he has left a significant mark on the self-image of Latvian art, as well as on the Latvian understanding of the landscape.

Ģelzis: A special kind of romantic workhorse.

Fišers: I don’t know much about Mr Purvītis, but I quite like those thaw landscapes of his.

What, in your opinion, does real art mean?

Neiburga: For me, real art is something you don’t immediately forget. Something that has an effect – emotionally or intellectually, or perhaps just purely visually, or in all of these ways combined...

Eglītis: Art that names something essential which is out there in the air, but has not yet been defined. It relates to what is already present in the world, and at the same time, through its presence, creates something unprecedented, expanding the world of consciousness, imagination and the mental realm.

Ģelzis: When we think about the fact of beauty, the thrill can only exist in the future tense.

Fišers: I like to think that real art develops and transforms the personality of the art enjoyer through a rigorous selection process.

Is your art related to current events?

Neiburga: Several works are related to my personal current events.

Eglītis: It depends on what one considers a current event. It is not related to socio-political current events. It is related to my own current relationships with the world and consciousness. I suppose I would like it to be more related to the important and non-current than to the current and unimportant.

Ģelzis: Yes, and I repeat the volume of the notoriety of a vice or an event.

Fišers: My art is related to subjective current events, though that is obviously not a rarity.

What is beauty in art?

Neiburga: Simplicity and clarity.

Eglītis: Beauty in art is beauty that has broken away from decorative beauty and is filled with meaning. This beauty can have very different relationships with banal beauty and sugary-sweet beauty, and, of course, it is in a constant striving for True Beauty.

Ģelzis: It is the encoded phenomenon of Expansion without words.

Fišers: This question simply does not exist for me.

What is success in art?

Neiburga: There is professional success, where your calendar is full of various exhibitions and other events, and there is personal success, when you feel that you are developing, not stagnating. When you are interested and captivated, knowing what you are doing and what you want to say. When you feel you have moved forward, rather than sideways or backwards in your thinking.

Eglītis: Success in art and success in an artist’s career are different things. There are undoubtedly some correlations between both types of success.

Success in art is when you have created real art (see question no. 3) – when you have created some kind of uniqueness that significantly contributes to forming the image of the world, expanding perceptions, and also triggering a human (emotional, intellectual, spiritual...) experience.

Ģelzis: Success is not a ready-laid breakfast on the table; it is the specific atmospheric pressure of a new day in the artist’s kitchen. It changes the habits of enjoyment in daily life.

Fišers: Success makes the inner reptile fatter and nastier, and thus requires a firm hand in taming the reptile.
Article first published in the February 2017 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks