Drawing, painting, design, and thought intersect in the practice of Anton Ian Nielsen as a lifelong dialogue between curiosity and discipline. Rooted in early devotion to drawing, shaped by close study of the masters, and tempered by moments of doubt and reinvention, this body of work reflects a deep respect for fundamentals alongside a refusal to remain confined by them. Painting emerges here not as statement or instruction, but as a living process—intuitive, reflective, and inseparable from lived experience. This interview traces a path through obsession, crisis, play, and renewal, revealing an artistic practice driven by consciousness, curiosity, and an insistence on staying awake to the act of making.

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How do you reconcile the tension between raw, innate creativity and the discipline required to master your craft?

I had a big Leonardo da Vinci obsession when I was a teenager. I bought a huge coffee-table book filled with his creations, thoughts, and sketches and read it back-to-back. Reading that book instilled a sense of discipline in me. If I truly wanted to become an artist, I thought, I needed to learn how to draw traditionally, from what I saw in nature and stay curious about drawing and painting as a field in itself, especially if I wanted to eventually go off the rails and find my own way of doing things.

Looking at modern painters during my teenage years also made me realize that the artists I admired, especially from the Impressionists and onward, all had distinct styles. I concluded that their individuality came from a deep understanding of fundamentals. I think it’s the same in every field. I played basketball as a kid, and my coach always told us we shouldn’t try behind-the-back passes if we hadn’t mastered the basics of passing the ball. He would yell.

“A painter ought not to be versed in painting alone, but in many other things.” Leonardo da Vinci

That was another quote that stuck with me.  If you simply draw or paint what’s in front of you without curiosity or knowledge of what you’re seeing, the work becomes bland. I eventually translated that idea to life itself: the best artists put their whole person into their work, and that person has to be shaped and calibrated by their experiences, knowledge and world view. It also inspired me to pursue other fields in life as well. 

“First you master your instrument, then you let go of that and play jazz.” Miles Davis.

Art is often chosen as a medium for its freedom. Why do you personally turn to art, rather than another form of expression?

I’ve been drawing passionately since I was one or two years old. So for me, the visuals were a language, a way to communicate and simply create. I think that’s an innately human thing; we are creators, who want to create things. My youth was a mixed bag of things, but I was blessed with being encouraged to keep drawing as much as I could. In school, it somehow became an identity and something to rely on. I had skills in the human world of children.

As I mentioned earlier, my teenage years were spent studying the masters and drawing like a maniac. Then my 20s hit, and a great crisis followed about which path to go down. I knew I wanted to become an artist but didn’t know how to paint and didn’t have any proper understanding of color. Was I intended to become a designer? I thought. I liked clothes and popular culture. In those years of the serious adult world, the joy of creating visually was substituted by the great pressure I had put on myself, to draw portraits perfectly and to keep my drawing regimen going.

I turned to graphic design to turn my drawing skills into something useful for others. I knew few painters or other artists back then, and for those I knew, their way of painting was magic, something I looked at but didn’t comprehend. Huge crisis and inner turmoil followed. I managed to get a career as a graphic designer and met fellow designers, most notably Matilde Digmann. Her style inspired me immensely at the time, and somehow her environment inspired me to turn my digital work into painting. I started with watercolor, then acrylics, and now oil.

At that point, around 23–24 years old, I decided I was done trying to impress people with my realistic drawings and would begin to draw, and paint, the way I did as a kid. Learning to paint at what I then thought was “a late” stage in my life gave me a huge burst of energy, ambition, and release. Finally, I was able to understand the gist of painting.

My mother and grandmother were painters but couldn’t really teach me how. Looking back, I was pulling people’s trousers, begging them to teach me something I had to discover myself, by relaxing, first and foremost. There can still be blocks, drainage in the sewage, but these days, whenever I paint oil-on-paper studies, I feel like the kid I was in 5th grade, and that’s a wild thing to say, given how neurotic and confused I was acting about it earlier.

How important is it for viewers to understand the intended message of your work? Does ambiguity add value, or do you seek clarity in your expression?

If I sat down with the intention of “Now I want to show the world x, y, z,” my ego would be so inflated I wouldn’t like myself, and I might have a better shot at becoming president somewhere. History has a great catalog of creators turning insane, thinking they are the physical embodiment of Christ, unable to deal with their own pressure, from needing to convey a certain message. I’m very aware that painting, creating things, is a form of channeling the subconscious mind, not me personally wanting tell “the world” anything particular. I show up and do my thing, take a photo, and post it on Instagram, prepare the piece for an exhibition or a collector, put it in my drawer.  Speaking to the idea of the person showing through the work, I feel extremely lucky to be able to do that, to have painting as an expressive medium.

Depending on how you work as a painter, the end result can be a surprise as well. Just the fact that you are creating something is a strange act of rebellion, causing people to stop and think. I hope my paintings can act as Rorschach drawings, where you project the meaning you find in them. The medium becomes the message, that’s what’s so interesting about any art form. Painting is not graphic design; its intention is not to verbally and visually inform the viewer. I believe you can read people’s intentions, thoughts, mood, and so forth through a good work of art, so that’s my humble attempt: that my visual work can somehow function as a visual diary of my conscious and subconscious mind until the day I’m no longer here.

It’s only in the last four years or so that my paintings have been for anyone other than myself, so I find it deeply humbling to see the range of interpretations people bring to my work. I guess a message from anything creatively commodified is: “This is a painting. Someone made this. Placed it here. I’m not alone in the world. A person did something for the love of it, not for the sake of survival. Someone is trying to communicate. You ask the questions.”

If you could communicate just one core message through your entire body of work, what would it be?

✧ You are alive.
✧ You are conscious.
✧ Use your time well.
✧ The things you are afraid to admit are hidden deep within your own consciousness.

Is that one or four? The most important thing in life is to be curious about everything. Referring to my previous answer, the work should speak for itself and whatever emotions it might evoke is the right answer. What’s important for myself as an artist is a mix of renewal and (hopefully) longevity. I’m super inspired by older artists who keep reinventing themselves time and time again, challenging themselves, their medium, keeping true to themselves whilst being updated with their time, it leaves me speechless and evokes a sense of wonder and magic I love more than anything. 

Can you take us through the evolution of an artwork, from that first spark of inspiration to the finished piece?

First, you find a chopping board, a sharp knife, tomatoes, and onions. Chop the onions carefully, without hurting yourself. Oil to the pan, let them fry. Chop your tomatoes and add them in with ground chili and paprika. Add some organic eggs. Smile. You have just made yourself an omelet. The inspiration is the hunger. You need to eat. The tomatoes, eggs, and onions are your ingredients. This is your paint. The chopping board is your piece of paper, where you draw your initial sketch. The pan is the canvas where you grind it out. The plate is how you position your work, digitally or physically.

The difference between cooking an omelet and painting is that you can’t eat your ingredients while you’re painting. Unless you are Van Gogh, then let’s Gogh. Another difference is that when I paint, at least for me, I try to push myself, challenge my own conceptions, take a risk, and see if the reward pays off. It’s difficult to describe that state without turning to the occult. A Danish painter Per Arnoldi once mentioned the magic of “seeing your painting for the first time, although it has always existed.” It is a deeply mystical experience, but also a feeling of awe and wonder that most of us can recognize, from peak moments of life.

I’m also working on larger, sculptural structures with architect Juliane Diness. Here the process is different: a small drawing of a turtle on a piece of paper, an initial render on the computer, someone says yes, technical drawings, communication with construction workers, and then, one to three years later, elation and joy.

Is art created for the artist, the audience, or somewhere in between?

I guess both. I can sometimes have a hard time relating to myself as an artist. I mean, professionally, I am one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything I produce can be labelled as art, and I’m also very capable of creating things that shouldn’t be shown to anyone. I think it turns the analogy around, how childbirth doesn’t only create a child, it also creates the mother, who wasn’t there before, only a lingering potential for that experience. Does a tree make a sound in the forest if no one is there to hear it? Does art exist if the audience isn’t there? Of course. But the audience is happier when it sees something. And who, or what, is an audience anyway? An abstract question.

To bring it down to earth, a lot changed for me when I finally mustered the courage to show people my paintings and understood that they had to live somewhere out there, and that this was an important part of the practice. Having spent most of my time not really showing much, except on Instagram, I was driven by something else, my own curiosity and joy in painting and creating. Showing my work involved logistical things I wasn’t used to, vulnerability, and presentation skills, showing up in an ironed shirt and talking about the subconscious, blue dogs, and warped people. That gave me contact with some wonderful people in the art world, which gave my work another life. It still happens often, in exciting ways, that another eye on your work can fundamentally change things.

But if there are any young aspiring artists reading this, as Rick Rubin mentions, your art should be created for yourself. If you create with an audience in mind, you will do bad work. As simple as that.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly infiltrating creative fields. Do you see artificial intelligence as a threat, a tool, or a collaborator in the art world?

I think AI is both extremely interesting and haunting at the same time. As we all know, we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg with these tools, without having any ideas of the societal and personal implications and how people relate to others, things, and themselves. I like to think that the people running the room-sized IBM computers in the 1950s couldn’t fathom social media, let alone the implications they are having; brain-fry, but also hyper-connection, opinions, knowledge, and facts being shared at every second. Ten years ago, we did not know how the social media landscape would change the world and ourselves.  I’m a fan of the Italian-American inventor (of the microchip) and thinker Federico Faggin in that regard. His opinion is very straight-forward: machines will never become conscious. Computers will never have consciousness, only the appearance of it, as of now, with the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT, etc.

It raises the question, what is consciousness, then? What does it mean to be human? And in that world, where fictional essays can be produced by the speed of light, graphics also, I think art is more important than ever, to help the audience decipher between what is real and not real, and therefore, where the value is. I’m very idealistic about the innate humanness of humans, the beauty and flaws of humankind. Impressive technological machinery will be a mirror of us humans, hopefully helping us with things we can’t do ourselves, but not a threat to human expression and art. I doubt people will find it interesting to watch things made entirely by a large language model.

Kids growing up these days, for them it will be normal to be able to talk to a computer and get a coherent answer back. I have no clue where the advancement of AI will take the human race, but hopefully it will make people’s lives easier and more fun, and I’ll have my popcorn ready to watch the show.

How do you envision the evolution of your work in the coming years?

Hopefully I will just produce as much as possible. I graduated as a technical designer in industrial production this summer and activating that part of my brain to create more technical works of art has been super interesting. But the way of working, on a day-to-day basis at least, is very different from painting; having oil stains all over the studio is different from the long-term planning of sculptures. I’ve also published five children’s books, which is a wonderful medium, but my head has been full. It might change in a few months, but as it seems now, painting, and at a larger scale, is where my focus is at. I hope to create as much as I can with what I have at hand, and I’m very curious about where my journey will take me.

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Across these reflections, Anton Ian Nielsen presents art as both necessity and experiment: a way of thinking, testing, and remaining in conversation with the world. Creation appears as an act of attention rather than control, where meaning is allowed to surface rather than imposed. From oil studies that recover childhood freedom to sculptural works unfolding over years, the practice resists closure in favor of continual movement. What remains consistent is a belief in curiosity as a guiding force, in consciousness as material, and in art as evidence that time, care, and presence still matter.