Saturday, June 25, 2011
Paavo Rintala's Last Letter
Paavo sent me this letter a couple of years before his death in 1997 "on account of some conversations we've had in recent months..."
In the early 1990's he said that he still had another decade to do something. He had developed an illness, the duration of which was estimated at ten years. His last great passion was to accomplish an opera on “Time and Sleep” (Aika ja uni).
We had lots of phone calls. I taped some of them. Some of essential topics were the persons whom Rintala lists in his “Nekrologia” section. The names had been picked up from the lists of names in the Vienna Cemetery. The libretto represents the last burst of the essential, when everything vain in life has fallen off.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Symposium
Someone thought my fellow drinker here was Pentti Haanpää, but certainly not. It is with Paavo Rintala that I am mulling over the way of the world, and that of Oulu in particular. We were united by the fact that we were both evacuees and fond of Russian literature, Dostoevsky above all. We could never get away from them. Oulu meant a laboratory to us, and we reflected its characteristics in our doings to mean the entire world.
In his novel “Aika ja Uni” [Time and Sleep] Paavo returned to Oulu, and I also had to paint the “100 Pictures of Oulu” collection, which also included this “Symposium” painting. Paavo said the pictures were as if they had been straight from his dreams.
Tuesday, June 21. 2011
What Do I Really Look Like?
I painted this self-portrait ten years ago. I took a photograph of it. Later on, I destroyed the painting. I just couldn't watch it. Ever since I was a schoolboy I have been trying to outline myself. The paintings never became such a handsome figure I thought I was. They were lousy pictures that should be destroyed. And I did destroy them. Know thyself, said the ancient oracle. It is a hard word, so hard to do.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
The EU Field
My father had enjoyed Siberian welfare for four years. He did not tell us much about those times. But he did say that wherever communism comes, hunger will follow. I am not going to say much about these EU times – but I will say anyway that the breadline came her along with the EU.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
In These Times
During and after the last wars I started to think about the way of the world. Quite naturally, I started to search for the classic truth: where have I come from, where am I and where will I go. Luckily, I rid my mind of school studies and stuff early, because there was no place where the things I considered important were taught. I became a searcher for truth and lover of wisdom, in other words, a philosopher. It's a job and hobby that never takes you to your destination.
I happen to be living in a time in which a small country successfully retained its independence at war and rose to an unprecedented glory at times of peace. My fate has been also to see the loss of what was gained. Finland joined the bigger ones, selling lightly what our fathers had acquired through major sacrifices.
Identifiers: Fatherland
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
A Short History of My Online Pages
I guess I am one of the first few artists who built a real exhibition on the Internet. It happened in 1998, in other words, soon after the Internet was born. It was the result of many coincidences.
The City of Oulu agreed to host “100 Pictures of Oulu”, for which I am so grateful. The counter claims there have been 136,320 visitors so far to the site. At this time there are about 150 visitors per week.
The cultural navigator Heikki Kastemaa had a nice way to say how he found my web pages:
“I had to browse the web quite a lot and, with my nose in the laptop screen, surf for half a year in Central Manhattan, among other places, until I realised that Eeli Aalto at Kempele is giving the best online exhibitions to be found. Realising something like this must be one of the great paradoxes of life and the Internet.”
I published my first blog text on February 17, 2008. In ten years a slew of easy-to-use sites for anyone to use had appeared. So arose the so-called social media. Nothing similar has ever taken place since Gutenberg's press. It revolutionised the dissemination of information for good and evil.
For an autistic guy like me, the blog offered by Google was an excellent choice. Sure, I had my doubts when I started experimenting with it. It would lead to some exposure. Fortunately, the YLE Living Archives started to publish my TV films starting in the 1960's. Modern technology makes it possible to scan old diaries. I open up my archives, I write a diary, my self-portrait.
Of course, these pages are marginal. There are about 200 visitors each week. Some of them are Finns living abroad in the United States, Germany, Russia, Ukraine... should I say in a Cartesian fashion: I have a blog site, therefore I am.
Identifiers: short history
Monday, June 6, 2011
Extracts from Diaries in the 1950's
After my years of studies in Helsinki and Paris, I had returned to Oulu. The gloom left by the wars could be seen everywhere. It was not easy to adapt. One could not lean on the conceptions of art that had been prevalent before the wars. A vague modernism was trying to gain a foothold, but no-one knew what it would be in more specific terms. Non-figuratism, truly to its name, only told what it would not be. The last great artists from Kandinsky to Picasso belonged, in a way, to the pre-war era – and thus to the past. Besides, who needed art as there was a lack of everything.
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