The British art superstar Flora Yukhnovich, the Freakonomist Steve Levitt, and the upstart American Basketball Association were all unafraid to follow their joy — despite sneers from the Establishment. Should we all be more willing to embrace the déclassé?
I grew up in a place called Norfolk, which is a very rural part of the UK.
That is Flora Yuknevich.
Her mother was a teacher, her father was in the navy.
From a young age, Flora wanted to be an artist, but she was also pragmatic.
So rather than studying fine art at university, she studied graphic design.
And then after that, because I really missed painting, I went to the Heatherly School of Fine Art and did.
I did a portrait course for two years.
And then I thought I'd be a portrait painter and I did not like it and I wasn't good at it.
Why did she want to be a portrait painter if she didn't like it and wasn't good at it?
It just seemed like it was a viable job and that it would be a reasonable living and that I'd be able to paint all the time.
But after her portrait course, she went in for more art training at Sidion Guilds of London Art School, one of the oldest art schools in England.
There she studied art history and theory and she steeped herself in aesthetics, essentially learning which artists were worth emulating.
Frank Auerbeck and Lucian Freud were, like, very important to me.
Oyerbakh and Freud were giants of 20th century figurative painting.
They both made intense, moody pictures in somber colors and earth tones.
It was like this group of mythical geniuses that you could only aspire to be like.
They filled my head with the idea of what an artist was, this sort of tortured genius alone in the studio.
So when you say that Auerbach and Freud were important to you, do you mean in that everybody knew that they were important and that they established a standard of taste that people were supposed to embrace or that you actually loved their work and wanted to create like them?
Probably both.
They became the things that you were supposed to look at, and there were things that you weren't supposed to look.