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My thoughts of painting
In Free Art School I familiarised myself profoundly with chromatics and got tools for painting. Anyway, only after I began to work independently the potential of painting opened out to me in full scale. Although the teaching in school concentrated on colours and on abstract expression I always needed a form as a baseline. Fortunately, my teachers understood me and they let me to develop the expression of my own in peace. After graduation from Free Art School I moved back to Järviseutu in Southern Ostrobothnia. I had been absent for ten years and a lot had changed and I looked my home district with a stranger’s eye. The derelict, phased out barns raised my attention. The grey barns standing on the green fodder field seemed to be red whereas barns on the yellow rape field turned into purple. I had found unintentionally the subject for myself from barns and my first barn paintings were based on pure real observations. My paintings have changed during the years. I have painted log barns, board barns, barns with two doorways with a scene of a restricted landscape, run-down barns, barns with wooden shingle roof or tin roofs or no roofs at all. I have been interested in the lights and shadows of the barn interior or in the weathered shaggy boards of exterior walls. I have a strong local bond and for me art is created by the environment where I live. Many of the barns I have painted were destroyed already long ago. In my paintings they got another life. To some extent my paintings are also documentaries of something that once existed. Someone once said that I’m recording local culture history from the buildings which were never considered very interesting but which are part of the history of hay-making. For me painting represents thinking and existence. When painting I’m strongly present and my work proceeds on the terms of the painting. Beforehand I choose only the form and the colour. It means that I’m giving myself a coloured task and by solving it I rely on the process. I’m making choices and conscious solutions trusting also on intuition. I paint because it is challenging, slow and as an instrument difficult to take over. I paint because I enjoy it. For me painting isn’t any pain or agony, it is an addictive pleasure. The more I paint the more my understanding grows what I could do and how I could do it. I have not enough time to paint all I want during one lifetime, but I’m glad that I have the opportunity to express myself via painting. I never had to think what to do next. For me painting is a continuum, in other words a new ready painting is always a key to a new and forth-coming one.    |
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