Reality of art
I am an image maker artist from Tampere, a manual and mental worker. I live for fine art, thinking and life itself. With my art I want to map out life’s humane features and to better understand the relationship between history and the surrounding world. My work has been selected for several exhibitions and I have been canonized as an ITE- and Outsider artist. Inspired by my late friend poet Jorma K. who appeared to me in a dream, urging me to showcase my art.
OTHER ART PROJECTS
My artistic career began with painting religious icons at the at The Valamo Monastery, back in 1997. I began by testing painting with squeezed berry juice pigment on the icon bases. Around the turn of the millennium, I also composed performances involving experimental photography, oil painting, and collaging environmental and spatial pieces using waste materials.
After an intense period of painting, I began to miss fresh perspectives and ventured into minimalist drawing. Later on, I joined the RAILO poet collective and the cartoons MOLLE MUUPERI’S URBBAN ADVENTURES for the Kipunoita -magazine and TEPPO NAATTI ALIAS LINTUMIESTÄ for the Rätinki -magazine were born. I also wrote paces and articles and did drawings according to the changing themes of each issue. Finally I ended up working at the magazine’s editorial board. The Kipunoita publication was dedicated to mental health and well-being issues and was published by the Taimi mental health association.
As of 2006, I sang and wrote songs in a music group called Lomo (an abbreviation in Finnish for: orchestra of slightly odd music). We were once asked to play as a warmup group for a well -known band. At that point I decided to break up our group, as I wasn’t interested in fame or success, preferring a more experimental approach. Our next group Liirum Laarum did not perform publicly, only as animation characters. Later I have found my musical home, with the experimental production called PR-TOIMISTO, PESONEN JA REKOLA.
In recent years I have also taught comic drawing and painting courses. I have also worked at care homes for both old and young and with people with intellectual disabilities, directing various art projects. For the last 10 years or so I have been writing scripts and directing plays for special needs groups, basing the scripts on the group’s own ideas.
THOUGHTS ON MAKING ART
For me, the most important thing about art is play. I play, therefore I am. At some point I formulated a theory of love. I made a philosophical equation of the things that needed to be possible to enable love to actualize itself. I was 30 years old when I came to the realization that love takes many forms. At that moment I decided to archive my thoughts in ‘the heaven of theories’, while in the meantime I gain a little more life experience.
About 20 years ago I imposed a publishing ban on myself. It meant that I would not promote my career in any way and that I would not make public appearances regarding my art. The self-imposed ban was a statement against a so-called attention and shouting economy, and the rule of financial interests on this earth. The world, however, has not changed, but I have. With this webpage, I want to decree the end of my self-imposed publishing ban. Hopefully this will also be the final battle against my strict superego and will instead be a beginning for a new era of gentleness.
I strive for an open, equal and environmentally sustainable world, where diversity and humaneness can flourish, abhorring inequality and the destructive and hostile activities that the human species inflicts upon itself, other living entities and biodiversity. Whenever I have consumed natural resources in my art, or I have felt that my art has ended up being a selfish process, I have questioned my own artmaking. In my ideal world there would be no strong confrontations or wars, instead each of us would be connected to both art and our own individual internal worlds.
If I think of art as an analogy for a playground, my favourite sandbox has always been visual art. Drawing for me, is about charting humanity from different perspectives and the journey of surprises it has sprung on my own consciousness. My oil paintings are mainly portraits or abstractions, as I like to call them. My portraits contain a lot of spontaneous expression, making a statement, or positioning myself into something I want to experience. In the abstractions I paint on coloured surfaces, exploring different emotional states and the spiritual dimensions of the piece.
In recent years I have been making internal self-portraits using mixed media techniques, playing with the idea that we all have our own internal self-image, with changing and permanent qualities. I have tried to trace both mine and your, authentic and true internal self-image. The fragile and sensitive self-image seems to be all too easily concealed, without us even realizing the masking and defenses we have constructed around us to protect ourselves.
Making art has gradually become a more contemplative process for me, each of my pieces taking up their own sweet time to be completed. Nowadays I have less of a definitive process of making art. It is almost as if the piece I am working on defines the time and nature of the process. Naming my pieces has become increasingly important for me. Along with direct experiences, it gives an added dimension to understanding the piece. Ultimately however, I hope the light will filter through “the birch leaf masking” revealing our innermost space within.
The purpose of this website is also to turn my gaze outward. I have been available to my closest friends, now I am aiming to reach out to the world. I love the ITE and Outsider Art families, despite having tried to avoid belonging to any “isms” or groups in the past, I now feel have found my own niche as an artist. Art provides me a safe space in which to feel complete, to explore and understand all things human. I am already eagerly waiting for my new drawings and paintings to emerge, which will be completed in all due time. In my world art and playfulness will save the earth.
A NEW BEGINNING IN THE YEAR 2000
In 2002, my health collapsed and after making it through hospitalization, I experienced as kind of rebirth. I ended up isolating myself in the countryside to get my own peace and space. My emotions and psychological stare enabled a personal journey of exploration into various body -emotional experiences, where I aimed to empathize and understand the various aspect of what it is to be a human, wanting to access it’s unknown even incomprehensible territories. At the same time I was processing my emotions through painting.
Even if emotions are connected to our surrounding world, I wanted to try to disconnect them and differentiate between various emotions, avoiding preconceived beliefs, notions or constructs. My emotions motivated me, and I wanted to further provoke them, in order to express them colourfully, vividly and powerfully. Using oil on panels, I painted my inner observations of these emotions as figures, facial expressions, texts, or as simple coloured surfaces. I felt that was able to understand and relate to emotional blind spots, that I previously hadn’t had access to.
I wanted to be as honest as possible in conveying those emotions. If I liked any particular piece too much, I could destroy it. This was one way of "flogging out honesty" as not to become too pleased with myself or losing myself in conventional representation. Another method was to paint over an existing piece. Much like in real life, the underlying paint layer ends up influencing the final painting. During the painting process, I found it fascinating to delve deeper than the surface, beyond moral and aesthetic requirements. More than two hundred works were created during the 1–2-year painting process.
Those nervous changes would often make the paining process challenging, but for the most part it felt liberating. It felt relieving, and somewhat healing to dismantle the moral and social constructs that I had built up for myself. At some point, I decided to stop conceptualizing my emotions and my various mental states, as not to affect the painting process too much. As I came to understand my emotional response patterns, I learned that those patterns were to a large extent, either inherited, acquired, or in fact the result of profoundly altered mechanisms of a wounded mind and body. I realised that in my normal state of mind, I had constructed internal barriers to experiencing certain emotional states.
For me, the painting process has been a journey into emotional expression. An attempt to connect sensorily perceptible and outwardly expressed emotion, with my own internal world and translating it onto the canvas, as authentically and expressively as I possibly could. I experienced these states of emotional stimulation in the security of my own solitude. Objectively speaking, my painting process could also be described as a kind of a partially controlled journey or regression into the different stratums of human emotion, which lie within each of us. From a subjective point of view my tools were merely my mind and body, a paintbrush, a rag or just my hand as tools in carrying out the work onto the canvas. Naturally, the process was therapeutically useful for me.
Painting has given me an opportunity to access my individual human emotions and information processing. It has also helped me to better understand the complex and increasingly accelerating- object filled reality in which we live. I feel it is important to strive to understand the subjective nature of one's own reality, learning about one's own defense mechanisms and generally gaining new insights on the human condition. During my painting process, I felt I was freely able to translate my emotions into art, devoid of inhibition and interference.