About

I’m Trym Ruud, born in 1998, and I paint from my subconsciousness. In my work you will see what that looks like, sometimes it’s messy and unclear, other times it’s like crystal clear water. Whether you experience it clear or not is up to you.

The robots have been with me since I was about fifteen. I actually started drawing them for a children’s book I was making for a school project, a book about being different from everyone else and how isolating that can be. I realize now that is quite a comprehensive theme for a fifteen year old to write about. The robots just come naturally to me, I have never had to force them. Funny enough, if I try to draw a Rude Boy by hand I really struggle with it. The exclamation marks are from the same years. I believe they are a sign of attention. They draw your eye to some areas of the work and bring attention to it, sometimes the exclamation mark can bring some uncanny level of discomfort as well, and that can be a positive or a negative. They also just come very naturally to me.

In 2021, for my bachelor project, I started publishing one digital work a day. Small 3D collectible toys in boxes that I called Rude Boys. The first ones sold for a couple hundred kroner. Nine months later sales had passed twenty million, newspapers called me Norway’s crypto art king, I didn’t really know what to think about it but I rode along with it. I gave a TEDx talk about persistent creativity and I opened my own gallery at Fornebu. I am really proud of the digital era, honestly still overwhelmed by it, and I am still very much in it. I just enjoy bringing the digital sketches to life now, whether that is a 3D print, a physical art piece or a painting.

Then the market turned. The tax was calculated on gains I never cashed out, the bill came after the crash, and I sold at the bottom and took odd jobs to pay it down. The creativity dried up for a while too. I have been rich and I have been poor. I am glad I have been both.

Somewhere in those years I started walking with Jesus, and my mind got steady. Out of that came Source, the image I keep coming back to, light exploding out of a center. Source is a God-like energy. It is the infinite love and energy we all draw from, and I believe our creativity comes from there. Maybe it is God himself speaking through my work. I know I am His work at least. For months at a time I can’t help myself, it is all I paint and draw.

I make art because I can’t not make it. I do some freelance graphic design and odd jobs here and there, so it is not that I can’t do other things. It is that creating is something I have to do and need to do. It is my calling. When you collect a work you get a piece of that. A piece of the struggle, but also the joy and the inspiration.

I don’t think I am out of the hard years quite yet. I feel like I am still in the middle of them, I guess we all are to some extent, but it is very manageable now. My skin has grown thick and I can stand in difficult situations a lot easier. Faith has made me much more stable, and I am not really worried anymore, even when things look hard and I am not sure how to make ends meet. I don’t feel like I have had a hard life. It has felt unfair at times, but it is up to me to turn that around and play the hand I have been dealt. And I have a winning hand for sure. This is not a sob story, it is a road to victory.

Everything here is an original. No prints, no editions. When a work finds its home it is gone. Each piece is signed and shipped worldwide from Norway with a certificate of authenticity. The framed works hang at Galleri Duer in Oslo and are delivered personally in Oslo and Bærum.

Thank you for reading! Stay blessed.
- Trym Ruud