The early summer, when green emerges and all is full of chrolophyll-green leaves, grass and seedlings! The short period of bright and vibrant light green, before everything settles to it’s customary dark green. A colour that, claimed the Finnish national painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, dominated the Finnish landscape during the summer so much, he wanted to escape it to somewhere else there’d be also other colours to paint.

Unlike him, I love this time of the year, spring turning into summer. I got the inspiration to this painting on a cloudy early June day, when absence of direct sunlight seemed to enhance the green colours in nature to almost neon-like levels.

“Early summer “. Oilpastels on paper 45 x 45 cm, 2022.

“Hate – Love” oilpastels on paper 50 x 33 cm, 2021

I got interested in different cloud formations in the turn of this decade (2019-2020). In this painting a single cloud had drifted in front of the sun on an otherwise a clear, sunny sky. The cloud is here seen from below, and it creates a stunning effect when it covers the sun.

The colors of the object (cloud) and it’s background create a tension, that is at the same time harmonious but also electrifying. The object is settling into the space. A cloud works here as a metaphor for the transience of everything: born out of water vapor, a cloud changes it’s size and shape almost constantly, until it disappears again.

This series is inspired from Buddhist tradition and the concept of ‘blue sky mind’: the expansive and vast, luminous, calm and clear mind that is always a part of us. This mind is just often hidden, at least partly from us, by thoughts, mind noise, emotions etc. These thoughts and “mind noise” may temporarily blanket our real state of mind, like clouds cover the blue sky sometimes.

“Cloud I”. Oil on canvas, 100 x 120 cm, 2020.

This soft pastels work has been made on the lakeside during summer 2019 and it took a few days in the outdoors to finish. Every morning I settled into the lakeshore, had a short meditation session and set to work. “Cloud” depicts a giant cloud that has settled over the pink lake and islands, like it was a living, breathing thing. You can think that the drawing contains several layers and meanings beside the depiction of physical surroundings. This is the first work about clouds that I did and set in motion a series of “Blue sky” paintings I started to work on later in 2020.

“Cloud” — Soft pastels on paper, 63 x 34,5 cm, 2019.

This oilpastels work was done on the lakeside during summer 2016 and it took a few days in the outdoors to finish. That specific summer was really cold and rainy, and the work depicts a view of the lake Hiidenvesi, as it was during those rainy days of July. The colors are muted to grayish green and blue and the lake surface seems almost white. There are just the basic elements: water, air, earth and the forest. Rain creates a pattern of blue-gray dashes all over the landscape, creating a peaceful and serene atmosphere. Even if the artist herself had to sit in the rain in her raincoat, trying to protect the paper from soaking by putting it under a transparent huge umbrella!

“Hiidenvesi Lake in the Rain”, oilpastels on paper,  71 x 52,5 cm, 2016