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There it is.
I couldn't find it when I was looking for it.
My parents were immigrants from Finland.
My father had a very hard and dramatic life story.
He was interested in art, but never had the chance
to practice it.
I'm sure though that he is one of the reasons that
I started to paint.
We used to paint together.
And he bought me my first materials,
and showed me how to do things.
He was interested in all kinds of art and used to say to me:
"Art is for people who think."
That's probably one reason my work has always something
to do with ideas, with history, with narrative, and processes.
Even though my work is very much centered in the practice
of painting, it is not about painting.
The interest in the book began with my own children,
and the experience of reading to them.
Both the fairy tales and the act of repetitive reading brought me
back to an earlier interest in history understood in the sense
of mentalités or modes of experiences of earlier époques.
A lot of the paintings draw together diverse references
gathered in this kind of research in historical
illustrations or children's drawings,
investigating and restaging past visual narratives
in contemporary situations.
I explore some of these figures to question a relationship to
the environment and the future.
These days, the work is a lot about concerns
for the future and about loss.
I don't know if painting is important in the grand scheme
of things today.
I know it's been important for me.
There's something about starting with some pigment
and a completely blank surface, something about making
something, stepping back, looking at it and saying:
"Is this how thing are made?"
The result might not be an answer.
But sometimes, if you're lucky, it can be a big
or a beautiful question.
Ok, I'm going to leave it for now.
That's ok.