Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Vasily Sesemann
My philosophical interests become concrete in my cooperation with the Dutch-American publisher Rodopi. Vasily Sesemann, a philosopher born in Vyborg, has acquired the cover pictures for his series of books from the photos I took in Vyborg in 1991. My nightly adventures in the streets of Vyborg thus bore such a beautiful fruit. When I say adventures, anyone will understand what it is like to walk alone with a camera in Vyborg at night. The simple truth is that nothing will ever see the light of day if you don't take risks.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Use of Reason
Socrates said to Critias that if we had common sense, “we would not attend to business that we do not know about, as we would know how to choose the experts for the purpose... that way each individual economy would be well managed guided by reason, and the republic would be governed well...” If things went so happily that the experts could rule and order how things go, then would they or the republic be happier and would things be run in the best possible way? No, reasons Socrates. Without knowledge of good and evil, knowing individual things loses its meaning. That's the core of the matter, for to understand good and evil man should know what he knows and what he doesn't know. “Can you imagine anything more absurd...” as “no-one can have any knowledge of what he doesn't know at all.” Socrates himself is in a dead end. He confesses to his pupil Charmides that he has no other solution to this matter but a Thracian chant. If Charmides should succeed in the search for knowledge and use of reason without it, then Socrates could be called a windbag and useless researcher.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Juhani Hakalahti / Jouni Kesti
In this summer season the Oulu Art Museum was showing the works of the deceased Juhani Hakalahti, and a large collection by Jouni Kesti who still paints and composes. Hakalahti used to teach Kesti the secrets of art, and Kesti to Hakalahti those of percussion instruments. Kesti honours his teacher with a likeness that convinces that the teaching was not in vain. When Jouni was presenting his exhibition to Chinese guests, an insightful laugh was heard loud in the art museum, proving the uniting power of art between different cultures. Kesti paints the same way he composes or does literary art. Whatever he does, he is always making his own uncompromising internal self-portrait. It is absurd, as impossible as the world, but it plays and laughs.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Christmas Meal 1946
My father had bought a Zeiss Ikon bellow camera from, I think, some German soldier in the wartime. I and my brother Gunnar (second from right) had taken a permanent liking to it. Following our times, we had acquired a magnesium flash that worked with the battery of an electric lamp, and when we pressed its button, it flashed in a big way and spread a huge cloud of smoke. I was fifteen and I wanted to take the photograph of my life. It was Christmas Eve, we had gone to the sauna and were having the Christmas meal. I placed the camera on the kitchen ladder. It was too bad the bottom of the photo was covered, but otherwise the photo came out just fine. I was proud of it, and I think I still am.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Painter
As you can see in this photo, I believe in painting. I have gathered some of the paintings I had at hand in 1999 in the same picture. If I was a musician, I would play the violin, If I was a singer, I'd learn to sing. This is not different in any way. You see, I am not only old-fashioned but also a little narrow-minded.
Outsider
That's what I was already when I was under forty, an outsider. The sixties was in all ways a very dynamic decade in Finland. To me, it meant the start of a career with TV films for nearly three decades. So how could I be an outsider? Well, I was, in the sense that I did not move to Tampere or Helsinki. After the Pohjoinen circle dispersed, there was no-one any more to talk to. My workmates were in Tampere. Up in the north, I was an outsider.
Photo: Timo Heikkala
Abstract Painting
I sometimes put some of my abstract paintings on display for my neighbourhood. I painted them for the fun of it when I was teaching. The storehouses of art museums are full of similar works. No-one likes to watch them long. Even at their best, they are decorative art. In this genre, no-one compares with eastern artists. In its opulence, the architecture of Muslim countries, for instance, is beyond compare.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Am I The Guy In That Picture?
Self-portraits are useful. The ancient philosophers already urged people to study themselves. Know thyself was the oracle's password in ancient Greece. Self-knowledge is, of course, about more than just the picture. Some religions simply forbid the picturing of people. Rulers cannot put up with individuals. Artists who have made honest self-portraits have been left alone. Who would like to be friends with one! This painting from 1959 belongs to the collections of the Tampere art dealer Husa.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
I Picture the Visible World
Abstract art and its isms pushed me away from public exhibitions right from the start. I left the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts on the very day when the contest assignment was two triangles and a square. I lived and live among people in this periphery, I portray them and that will have to do. When the requirement for abstract art came up, everything else was also made abstract. Now the whole world is living on mental images and concepts. Even economy is conceptual. The markets rule. Traditional money has lost its meaning. The rich are panicking. The value of gold has become immense – and, surprise, that of old-world art as well! Because you cannot sell or buy conceptual art.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Black and White
I like black and white and the shades in between. Every now and then I have painted black and white paintings. They highlight issues like form, rhythm and arrangement – the basic things. We live a large part of the year in a country of snow and darkness, somewhere in between white and black. The impressionist colour art was born in France. The painters only needed to go out to nature from their dark studios and start to paint. An unbelievable wealth of colours met them there. Theories are always formulated afterwards. The artist paints what he sees or saw. Leonardo considered painting the most valuable genre of art, as it works through the most sensitive of our senses, the sight.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Before the Flat Panel TV
Before the flat panel TVs people had paintings on the walls in their homes, and there were even paintings on display in exhibitions. They were viewed for the lack of anything better, sometimes laughing, because more often than not, the paintings were funny. Sure, one wanted to see the work of real painters during trips, such as Mona Lisa in Louvre, Paris. It was not to be laughed at, although people wondered about its modesty. It was also so small in size. A flat panel TV is big. It replaces old-fashioned paintings. Everything made by hand is old-world stuff. We cannot go backwards in time, they say. And still, many of us, especially the older ones, miss the old times when they watch the picture of the world that the flat panel conveys. Would there be anywhere, we wonder, a peaceful nook or corner, a cottage at the edge of a forest, a living-room where there's a hand-made painting hanging instead of a flat panel TV? I don't think so.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Lost Times
The artist is trying to create the impression of a moment that has been stopped. I painted this self-portrait in the year 2000. Ten years earlier, I had been in Vyborg making the documentary entitled “My Vyborg” for TV2. I wanted to paint this picture, this mental image of me standing in this corner, with the Vyborg Castle in the background. If am I really standing here and if there really is such a place is a different story. The fact is, however, that every painting made by an artist is an image of something – it has always been. Because there is no other reality.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Mankind at War
Sometime in the 1960's I drew this chaotic war picture with a marker pen in A1 size. I made a “sunny” painting on the same theme in the 1980's. This theme could be repeated endlessly by just changing the name of the massacre. I already drew war pictures when I was a child. It seemed natural, because I was growing in the midst of two wars. A few years ago, I was watching Uccello's big war painting at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. On every independence day we Finns get seated at our TVs to watch “The Unknown Soldier”.
In 1795 Immanuel Kant wrote “Perpetual peace”, in which, among other things, he anticipated a world organisation similar to the United Nations that would prevent wars. Kant was not so sure that a total peace can be achieved.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The Larva and the Ants
Markus Aalto videoed this shocking drama at Osmankajärvi last week. An innocent pine hawk-moth larva was on its way to somewhere, when a swarm of ants attacked it. The larva tried to escape from the aggressors when there still were only a few of them. However, there soon was a countless number of them round it. They made such short work of the larva that there was nothing left of it when the ants went away.
Help, Murder!
Towards the end of the 1970's, Manu Paajanen the editor asked me if I could start providing illustrations for short stories published in the 'Elämä' magazine. I was living through times of a personal drawing boom, so it was quite okay with me. The magazine was one of a series which also included Nyyrikki, Perjantai and Jerry Cotton, all published in Oulu. Many Finnish authors had written for them. So I read the true-to-life texts, and drew relevant pictures for them. I had a whole page for my pictures, so it was not about some pieces of junk the size of a postage stamp. Bloody murder stories were part of the magazine's stuff. Why not, such is life.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Finally Kicked His Chair
My walking route goes through areas of detached houses that have been well taken care of. I paid attention to an old man who was always pottering about in his garden. Everything showed that he was a man who did a lot. I sometimes exchanged a word or two with this lonely man. Then one day he disappeared from his garden. Finally, I asked a neighbour if he knew anything about the old man. Yeah, he said, the old man could not manage his affairs any more. He was also in mourning for his son who had died a short time ago. He had become irritated and spilled his guts by kicking at his chair. The old man had been taken away. The city administrative court had nominated a trustee who prevented him from coming back to his garden. It would not be good, they had said. When I walk past the garden, I watch at it with a certain sadness, as it looks as forgotten and lonely as its last master.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Dance of Life
Man's life is like the fluttering flight of a butterfly. By someone's authority he has been sent to a life, to a freedom for which he cannot think of any sensible use. So he flutters, dancing through his life from one flower to another without settling anywhere, because he has been condemned to freedom.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Broken Me
It was not easy for young people before, either. I was twenty-six in 1957. I had finished my art studies, I had my life in front of me. There was no rosy future on the horizon. Anyway, I painted, I drew and wrote for something, for some reason that I did not know. It still do not know why art is made. It has always been made, for or without money. Many people dream about it.
Anyone Can Say Anything
Montaigne said this immortal wisdom: “Anyone can say anything.” This is highlighted in our times, as anyone truly can anonymously state any opinion whatsoever on anything on the Internet. Speed has such a significance that even news are preferably served in advance, without waiting for something to happen. Yesterday is out of date. The picture of the times is such that nothing is saved for the future generations except the debts. Governments are merciless in transferring their unpaid bills to the future. Nothing that will sustain is built for tomorrow. We have to go 500 years backwards to see something worth viewing in architecture or other arts. The old oriental town cultures are bombed into ruins, Europe itself is destroying its own nation-states.
