Creating Menagerie
This week, I share a recent acrylic painting called Menagerie and talk about the process. This is an example of making the most of the rich visual vocabulary – the topic that I talked about in last week’s video, but now we focus more on the idea of the piece rather than the style.
Recently, I have been thinking about the news feeds and their many truths. Although things are presented in beautiful phrases and pictures, the truth is much more complicated, and there are layers behind them. The same applies to people. Even though we try to be human, we are still animals, too.
When I paint, I struggle with the same thing: should I paint a flower or a soul?
I want to create beautiful paintings, but on the other hand, a painting is like a person. If you treat the painting superficially, you don’t get to see its true beauty.
I seem to paint better if I can partly focus on something else!
My goal is to give my paintings the freedom to be themselves and this painting really revealed its heart to me.
However, my task is not only to reveal the wild nature of the painting, but also to gently train it.
Menagerie is sold already. I hope it will bring joy to its new owner.
Details of Menagerie
Here are detail pics of the finished piece. I like how the style of this painting is partly illustrative. It looks like it’s partly drawn with a brush.
I wanted to create an impression that the animals are captive but still wild and strong enough to break free.
This painting has many layers and details.
I tried to bring up the similarity between flowers and animals.
Here you can see the big flower up close. The brush strokes are loose, but still, I painted them with a lot of thought and care.
I hope this inspires you to create too!
Painting a Mystery
This week is about painting a mystery and entering another world through art-making. My paintings are in an art journal and made with a loose touch.
It All Started from a Withering Bouquet
“The Midsummer bouquet has withered. I have to throw it in the trash,” I said. “But the setting is just like those old masters’ paintings,” my husband replied unexpectedly. And so I remembered this once again.
Once Upon a Time
Once upon a time, there was
and there still is a world that you can get to from anywhere.
At first, it’s dark, but you can hear a woman reading a letter to someone.
You hear a clock ticking backwards, generating more time.
Then you know that it’s time to take a brush in your hand.
Squeeze the handle firmly and hear the trees moaning as their trunks slowly sink to the ground.
First, it feels silly to paint because there’s nothing to see.
But the darkness gradually disappears, and you realize that you are not alone.
Those strange creatures are all familiar to each other and, in a strange way, to you too.
In this world, everything has been mixed up.
You are the wind that shook the flower, and in blowing the petals back, you lost your soul to it.
You are the chair for which the imagination built a room to rest.
In this world, everything is unfinished. But if you are willing to hear and feel instead of only seeing what’s expected, everything is ready enough.
Painting a Mystery – Background Story
The idea of this blog post came from that short conversation with my husband. Then I had to take a photo of the bouquet and make it in the style of old masters.
After that, I remembered taking a photo of a painting called “Woman Reading and a Man Seated at a Table” at the exhibition of the H’Art Museum in Amsterdam. The painting is by Frans van Mieris from 1676.
While browsing my image archive, I was drawn by another photo, taken in the same trip to Amsterdam. It was a decorative mantel clock from 1782 in the Rijksmuseum.
The clock took my thoughts to a more recent visit in Porvoo, Finland, where my husband and I went to see Johan Ludvig Runeberg‘s home. The lovely interior was from the 1860s, and there was a big painting that I really liked. I took a photo, but haven’t succeeded in finding out who painted it.
After gathering the photos, I picked up my art journal (Dylusions Creative Journal Square) and started painting. I didn’t copy the photos, but let them soak in freely. I was just inspired by the atmosphere they evoked in me.
Hopefully this blog post inspires you to paint freely without strict plans and definitions. Painting a mystery is both fun and addicting – I am already eager to create more!
Coloring an Intuitive Selfie
This week, we draw an intuitive selfie, so without a camera or a mirror. Let’s pick the colored pencils and create a self-portrait freely and intuitively!
We use the pencils as a camera and draw the face as it’s a photo taken from the inner world’s view. At the same time, we explore blurriness, freedom, and asymmetry. Watch the video!
Coloring an Intuitive Selfie – Watch the video!
I am creating my page on the Dylusions Creative Journal (Square, 8 by 8 inches) but you can use any paper and any size.
In the video, I talk about the difference between doing coloring pages and coloring a blank page, and how I have processed my word for the year “Release”.
Inner vs. Outer Selfie
It would be great to hear your thoughts on becoming freer and making an imperfect intuitive selfie. Leave a comment below!
Summer Watercolor Art with Origin and Attitude!
This week, I talk about creating summer watercolor art so that it’s fun and interesting. The season that you currently have doesn’t matter. It’s all about finding your origin and attitude!
>> See more pics at the Taiko online art store!
Although the seasons influence my paintings, I mostly want to paint summer. In winter I yearn for summer, in spring I plan for summer, in summer I live summer and in autumn I remember summer!
Starting Summer Watercolor Art
The best summer month in Finland is July because it’s warm and of course, has peonies and strawberries like in the painting. But when I started the painting, I had no idea what would come up. There were just splashes of color and plenty of water.
I like my summer watercolor art to have this kind of intuitive foundation with exciting randomness.
Finnish Summer
Peonies bloom at the turn of June and July and that is also when the best strawberry season begins. Finnish strawberries are really sweet, because the Finnish summer ripens them slowly. As a child, when asked for a favorite meal, I answered: Strawberries and whipped cream. I guess I was quite a romantic already!
Peonies are my favourite flowers and I have written a lot about them on this blog. Our garden has over ten different peonies and I am eager to see them bloom. I hope that winter has not disciplined the most delicate varieties too much.
In summer, everything turns upside down: frost turns into heat, darkness into light, heavy turns into light, and light turns into heavy. Summer makes the big picture blurred and the details become more important. What felt heavy in winter is hardly remembered in summer. And small moments, even small irritations, become more noticeable in summer. This must be the effect of continuous light.
I know foreigners who come to Finland in summer with eye patches. But for me, lack of sleep and summer go together. I am done with the pitch-black winter when morning sleep is still deep. The boring black-and-white sceneries are finally replaced by the rich colorful details that is food for my paintings.
Look how the leaves changed when I started adding details!
Finnish Simplicity vs. Central European
When we visited Amsterdam in May, we went to the Antiekcentrum, which is a huge antique flea market.
If there were a place like that in Finland, it would be full of Nordic design from the 1900s to the 1950s. Finnish high culture has a short history and our taste is a much more simplified version of Central European styles.
Our straightforwardness is not only in design, but it’s everywhere in Finland. We speak directly, often too directly, and value simplicity.
But despite the yearn for simplify, Finland is full of hidden romantics. The inner world of the seemingly rude people can surprise you. Our connection to nature is so immediate that not only strawberries and peonies but all the nature’s treasures creep into our souls so that we are not separate from them. Finnish people are confusingly simple and at the same time enormously diverse.
Details Make Any Peony Your Unique Peony
After the trip, I am increasingly aware that this is a part of Finland and Finnishness that I want to convey to you through this blog and my courses. I am aware that even if we share the love for art, we all have a little different point of view if we pass the big picture and turn our attention to the details. So, nuances in visual language and vocabulary!
If you look at the world as a big picture, your art becomes too mundane. When a peony is just a flower, art-making gets boring like Finnish winter: “How to draw a peony,” you will google and then draw a picture that has nothing unique.
Instead, think about your origin and attitude! Surrender to the details and let the heaviness of the earth and the lightness of the sky immerse you in what you draw. Maybe there’s a cloud who dreams about staying still, and a peony who dreams about seeing the world from the sky. By taking the creative attitude, the strawberries can grow bigger than their stems can hold.
Of course, these are just examples. My point is that in art, you can change everything and make anything possible when you:
- know your origin: Find what already grows in you!
- stretch the idea of any mundane thing: Allow imagination and empathy!
- work the details long enough: Give time for your creativity to find you!
What do you think?
P.S. I am currently recording a new course about watercolor painting. It’s an independent sequel to Freely Grown and focuses on the idea of building a visual vocabulary.
