The everyday life was rough, troubles with love and money, first of all with myself. There were periods with no reason to go to a grocery store but to take a sniff of all those wonderful scents. The aroma of bread and soap gave me faith to continue although the promised land was so far away. Still the star was shining in my heart. The day will come!
Thanks to pikes of Sammatti we had food even those days when I was totally broke. We hunted many great fishes from the small pound near by the wretched cottage of ours!
And thanks to the great artist and a friend of mine, Mr. Erkki Pirtola, he was the bond which kept me and world of art connected when I was sinking to the angry waves of life. Even now I can hear Erkkis spirit whispering: "...we have to do it..."
I´m thankful to my children and their mother, too. They had to face poverty when living with an artist like me. The sculls and bones of moose like the broken computers on our yard were signing our road from the past to modern life. Craziness! But they had to be there, those treasures!
Today I feel relieved when those days are over. Today is a good day. Art and life are blooming together.
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I was investigating my secret archives of the 80´s but I found this file. It´s from the year 1991. Let´s take a look!
Before I founded The Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs Finland, I had a possibility to make some shows for Finnish Yle TV1. The great artist, mr. Erkki Pirtola was invited to take part in the program. I had collaborated with Erkki from the year 1984. Erkki trusted me as an artist, even though I now and then was, well...let´s say, cranky.
Erkki wanted me to be his partner in the shows. And it was OK for the lady of the evenings. Thank you Mrs. Riitta Granath. Without Erkki and Riitta it would never be possible for me to chat a little bit with the Minister of Culture Tytti Isohookana-Asunmaa. It was such a long way from the forests to the offices of Finnish Government.
I borrowed the costume, (by the way, is that some kind of a smoking?) Anyway, it made me look like a new man, but I did not forget the reality of all friends of mine. In the pocket of my jacket, (Is that a jacket?) I had a piece of paper with questions and suggestions. I red the letter to the Minister of Culture but unfortunately we hadn´t time enough to solve the problems and at the end we just danced with the comp of my song.
The story of the song is about a man who wants to buy a lottery ticket. He imagines if he won a car, the main prize!
In the hall of the railway station he finds the seller of the lottery tickets. The man is sitting in an old car full of dents. The poor hero of our song runs to the salesman with his dreams and hopes. But he finds the salesman dead.
He had no huge dreams, well...the car, but even a beautiful pen or an ordinary hair comb were enough for him. Even something? But no prize at all...not today, not today.
The only he could do is to wish a happy journey to the salesman, who already was travelling on the gilded roads of heaven.
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The year was 1983 and the place was the town of Järvenpää. My interest in arts was growing up but I had not got into the Academy of Fine Arts. I had to go forward without teachers and contacts. Almost ten years earlier, maybe in the spring festival of our school, I´ve heard one guy playing piano and I admired him as an artist. But he was living in Stockholm and I had no contact with him...until he came back to Finland.
He was "Il Padre" for me. Collaborating with him opened new visions and got bravery to continue this dangerous path. Well, often I was not brave enough and then I made fatal operations with alcohol. In spite of these mistakes there were an amnesty by "Il Padre" for me and after these sad periods we were eager to go on.
Once I had a dream with a poem. The Voice told me: Katso aaltoihin, ne vyöryvät itsensä yli. Siinä on ajan syli. Behold the waves, they roll over themselves, there lies the lap of time...Many, many years later I used those words for the lyrics of the band Amorphis, but in the 80´s they got their place in the video which I made with Mr Asser Korhonen. (Also known as "Il Padre" or Mr. Asher.)
Asser was the cameraman and he made the music for our art video. My role was to be a reporter, but at the end of the video there happens something important for my later work. My first piece of some kind of performance art was born.
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Difficulties with drawing and painting made me so impatient in early 80´s. There has to be some faster way to get in living contact with all these pictures and feelings inside and around me! Should I start as a photographer? Or a filmmaker? Isn´t that too technical for me? Maybe an actor?
As a musician my only possibility was punk. But even it I felt a short path to a dead end. It´s true that I had inspiring vibes with electric bass or drums although I had no talents at all to play in a band. But I had some strange idea to make something with voice and sounds. My "playing" was like drawing lines on the air or spreading colors in space. Maybe I could form kind of invisible tonal sculptures. After all everything leaded to visions. So, it has to be visual art...but what kind of art is including music, pictures, dance, theatre...punk and symphony? It should not be dependent on money, expensive materials and studios, high tech instruments or slow drying oil colors! It should be free and easy like dreaming!
I tried to find my way thru fatal, happy, ridiculous and dramatic periods of my young life. Once I was wandering around in Helsinki and when searching some certain restaurant I hit my head to a column beside a pavement. Accompanied by huge bong and furious cry I lifted my eyes to a poster: Performance Art Course. Come and see, don´t hesitate!
With deep disrespect for the message of the poster I continued my walk and cursed the persons behind the art course. Something shouted inside me: Performance art can´t be taught! I´ve been wondering afterwords, where was this unconditional opinion from, because the fact was that I knew nothing about performance art. Later, as an art teacher, I found out that everything with a history can be taught. But, of course, I didn´t even know that performance art had some history.
But I had a clue, performance art happens intuitively. And it is for me!
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Nature conservation was unfamiliar to us as an organized activity. But we smelt something was wrong with...everything.
We had to wake up! Not at least for our own lifes but for The Nature too! So we founded the Nature Club Dracula to save the owls of the forest of Manni, the breams (Abramis brama) of the lake Tuusulanjärvi and the chubs (Squalius cephalus) and the gudgeons (Gobio gobio) of the river Keravanjoki. By doing that we also had some diminutive possibility to save ourselves.
Through hopeless and absurd demonstrations we wanted to attack against the indifferent of mankind. At the same time for many of us, at least for me, it was the battle against my inner conflicts, dilemmas and paradoxes. I had not yet heard about performance art. I knew nothing about it. But the actions of The Nature Club Dracula offered me the first stage for expression. It was possible to say something even then you have the feeling of knowing nothing, beeing incapable for rational discussion, facing overwhelming windmills...
To the end of my life I´ll be greatfull for the founders of the nature club, and the next generation too! They told me what´s the meaning of gudgeons (Gobio gobio), performance art and life!
If you, my dearest reader, sometimes want to know more about The Nature Club Dracula, I recommend you to arrive Finland and contact Mr. Esa Kallio, the Chairman of The Nature Club Dracula. Propably Mr. Kallio is working with some history project, but don´t hesitate, you will find him and he will guide you on the right path! Less is better!
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In the year 1979 I was a little bit interested in acting. Maybe the magical world of theater would be the home for my restless soul? But I had heard that it`s almost impossible to get in the theater school. So I decided to innovate something else. Anyway, I had already started my investigation with visual arts, drawing, painting and so on...
The problem was money. If I fortunately found myself making a painting (rich by colors of real life), I, at the same time, was reminded by...well, real life. I was forced to search some financially reasonable job to do. One very promising career was that with potatoes. Potatoes had been the solution for the problems of my fathers business struggle some years before and maybe because of that I instinctively sharped my eye to potatoes. Back to the roots!
But so stony are the fields of Finland and so tiny are the potatoes of cold earth that it soon turned out to not to be the way to the promised land. There has to be something else! Of course! How blind I was! The answer for all economical hopelessness is The Forest! Maybe because I was living in the middle of the forest I could not see the trees as my employer. One friend of mine had a moped and so we jumped on it and drove to a farm near by Lake Tuusulanjärvi. As a fact the farm was the very same that owned the potato field and just because autumn begun turn to winter, the boss ordered us to make some augmentation with sapling.
Sometimes it´s not so easy to keep alive your dreams. But if those visions are from the bottom of your heart, you and your dreams will survive. Little by little the dreams will ripen and they will get the best possible forms for you. You only have to be a good gardener, no matter how the conditions are like.
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In the 1970s I was in the Finnish Navy. We were sailing on the Baltic Sea with the corvette "Karjala". One day one of the officers ordered me to come on the bridge. On the both sides of the ship there were hanging provincial coat of arms of Karelia. Those signs of the ship were totally corroded by salty water. "Seaman Kainulainen, I have heard you are an artist. Loose the coat of arms and make them great again! Here is the paint and the brushes! What else you need?!"
"Nothing else, sir!"
So, there I was painting on the sunny deck of the boat in the middle of the Baltic Sea! Not bad, but how did they knew! An artist? Me?
Well, I had just been in a short vacation at home and my girlfriend, (later my wife and my ex-wife and the mother of our children) bought oil colors and all kinds of equipment, gave them to me and said: "Now boy, you have better to start to make art!"
So I did. At first I painted a picture about a white haired warrior with a red fluttering cloak. The star warrior gazed the viewer of the painting from the darkness of the universe. The second piece of art by me was more realistic: little flowers and some hay between stones.
So it happened, I started to paint during my army vacation. Still I wonder how did the Finnish Navy knew what has happened to me during the vacation? Who told them? Some kind of a cabal maybe?! Or somebody was calling me from the future? Who knows!
]]>Painting landscape was totally old-fashioned in Finnish visual arts at that time. But for me it was a way to study painting, to learn to work as an artist. The pictures did not appear without work. It was inspiring to read from books how Vincent van Gogh wandered with his equipment on the yellow fields with crows above his head. But to read about those things was not enough for me, I had to carry my empty canvas on the fields too!
There were numerous artists whose work I admired. The French impressionists as August Renoir, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and many others were my stimulators. One of those Frenchmen was named Camille Pissarro. His paintings were amazing ones. The best one was "Neige à Louveciennes", "Snow at Louveciennes". The Finnish painter Pekka Halonen was also a master of wintry landscapes.
The art museums of Europe were full of masterpieces! No need to paint more landscapes! And still I had to do just that! Alright, they are masters, their paintings are hanging on the walls of museums, I do not want to compete with them. And how to compete with praying? Painting landscape was a prayer for me. Most of all it was listening. I listened to the sounds around me and the sounds inside me. Somebody was talking to me, someone was teaching me. Try Pekka, don´t give up! You can do it! Make a colorful prayer!
I have not yet achieved, but who knows, maybe some day. Painting landscape is not over!
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It was early eighties when I discovered performance art. But before that I painted landscapes and tried to describe human beings. At the same time I felt it boring and useless and exiting. I worked for hours, days, months and years to learn how to make a picture with my own heart, brain, eyes and hands. Lines, forms, rhythms and colors, everything seemed to change all the time, the picture flew from my fingertips. Nature, as human face too, is an endless exploration to go. Still I could not think to be "just" an artist making landscapes and portraits.
Finally, after years, I found my secret path towards my inner nature to get contacted with the world around me. Indulging to the process of my art guided me to the area where inner and outer can be separated but also blended as one.
I´m not sure if there is some sense in these words. It´s the question of existence. As a human being you may face this strange feeling of almost understanding. In a fleeting moment you can see who you really are, where are you from and what´s the meaning of...everything!
And then you are back in this everyday life where the things are arranged, named and numbered by the power of zeitgeist. Hurry up! You´ll miss the train! I felt often to be in a wrong place at wrong time, but I learned to calm my mind by taking a step backwards. By being old-fashioned. Let the train go. I´ll stay here in the head of a wooden god. Here we are, me and my monster, looking at the moon. And the moon is looking at the landscape of the wooden god! And I am allowed to be a part of this...everything!
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"From Koitajoki", pastel on paper, 1979.
This pastel above I made as a young boy when trying to get an expedition into my family´s history in North Karelia. At that time I was learning how to paint landscapes. But most of all, I wanted to catch a big pike!
The River Koitajoki flows between Finland and Russia. It starts from the Russian side of the border to reach the Finland´s easternmost village Möhkö in Ilomantsi. The calm river flows through wilderness carrying some silent message as all the rivers do. Message of life and death. It´s a black vein in the body of terrain bringing the echoes from the Second World War but also something since time immemorial.
Well, I didn´t catch the pike neither some knowledge about my family`s history but this picture still remains. Actually I do have one certain memory of the moment when gazing over the river to a mute marshland and thinking about my father´s father. I have been told that he was a carpenter. A good one! His destiny was to die in the war. Maybe because of that sad fact I feel so happy to have so many Russian friends today! We understand the value of living carpenters. Those good ones!
But today I will recall one totally different river. To be honest, it wasn´t a river at all. It wasn´t even a rill. It was a crappy ditch, a sewer. But the day was beautiful! Me and a friend of mine were celebrating the end of May. School is over! We are free forever! To grace the eternal summertime we decided to destroy our school books.
My choice was to offer logarithmic graphs and the Kalevala. I ripped the books and threw out them to the ditch. The pieces of paper were dancing on glittering waves on their way to the Lake Tuusulanjärvi.
The next summer was exceptional cold. And the freedom turned out to be very limited. But something destructive has happened! In the autumn the pikes came into my art. At first I made drawings, then I started to paint them and finally I took the tools of a carpenter and started to make wooden sculptures.
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A Path in a Forest, pastel on paper, 1978.
My grandmothers were my first sponsors. This pastel drawing was the beginning of my art business. It was bought by my mothers mother. My second customer was my fathers mother and little by little the ring of my supporters grew to constitute all my family and relatives. With backup by them I started to travel my rocky road of an artist. Firstly in my visions I walked on the golden paths and then I struggled in every day life. Some kind of war it was. The most difficult antagonist was my self. Under the terrible pressure of artistic creativity I had to take a couple of beers and after some bottles of wine I was diving through an endless wave of booze. You may imagine how lovely oxygen was after that diving period.
The path of an artist was not easy to go but it was the only chance to grow!
Before those days I remember the time when I had not yet started as a professional artist. Even that time making pictures was essential. If I happened to have strange feelings, if I got lost in my emotions, and I certainly did as young men at that age do, I used to play music and draw. I had only a couple of records but they were my energy resource. The most important charger was the album To Our Children´s Children´s Children by The Moody Blues. You know, the Candle of Life and so on!
A marker drawing on the wallpaper, 1973.
Let´s get back to the year 1978. So, the first artwork has been sold. This has to be the sign from heaven! It really is possible to make a living as an artist! The second step was to hire an atelier!
"Well well, not so bad! But unfortunately I have to destroy it!"
After years I visited my dying grandma in a hospital. She was lying on a bed, suddenly she opened her eyes and said: "Pekka, have you been able to make art? Pekka, you are a fair boy but alcohol is not good for you. Pekka, this world is quite a bad place to live! Then she got to sleep again. It was the last time I met her in this world.
So, she passed away, but her death did not cut the connection. Asleep I have got many good advice from her. She still is my sponsor! A poet from Karelia.
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"Upon my birth/Came close to death"
But I survived. Very soon I found myself wrestling with bears and a bit later with beers too. The childhood was finishing and like everybody at that age I had to face my future. What to do with my life? I had some ideas to become a doctor. Then I found to be a pilot. How about gold digger? As a border guard I had excellent circumstance for skiing and fishing! Human soul is important, what happens to us after passing away? I want to be a priest!
Well, I was not yet ready. And I really had a big problem with that idea: which religion could be for me?
Now it turned to be serious! Until the sun of my life rose up, or was it a firestorm? In every case, I decided to be an artist.
"Self-portrait from the year 1978."
I went to the library of my hometown and browsed art books with a great admiration of the masters of art. I started to draw sketches in restaurants but wrestling with beers took so much time that my drawing developed so slowly, so slowly...I also was trying to study oil painting, I was interested in light but the shadows too.
"A friend of mine playing some sort of a kantele."
"Flowers" from the early 1980s.
Little by little I managed to make some pictures but still there was that big question: what is art? I mean: real art for me? My art?
At the beginning of the 80s I got a possibility to travel to southern Europe with my friends. Through France and Louvre Museum we ended up Spain. I had no problems with beer but wrestling with wine was almost fatal for me. After some difficulties I found my self gazing a huge painting on the wall of Prado Museum in Madrid.
Drafts from the series "It´s not so easy to get Centre Pompidou".
But finally: Madrid!
"The Third of May 1808" by Francisco Goya.
This was my first lesson of Art.
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A Mussel and the Pike.
This picture from the 1990s may be describable for telling about the start of my personal art history. Even though it´s not my first piece of art it includes the basic ideas for my later work. Art is a tool for understanding or resisting the fact I don´t understand. It´s possible to make a picture to catch even something...
I want to dive deeper! Where and when the Big Bang of my personal art history happened? I do have one special flashback about a bird, a huge, black cock with flaming comb. I was looking out of window and down on the yard there was a horse and carriage. And the cock was standing beside it and the bird was much bigger than the horse! A dream? Reality? Art? In every case: it is a picture. I was a couple of years old.
Deeper and deeper! "I have a wish to sing of time before the beginning..."
Well, let´s be satisfied for this watercolor from the 1950s.
My Mother as an Indian.
]]>I started my e-commerce in the autumn 2017. During this short time I´ve been shipping my books and other artworks to Italy, Russia, United States, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Belgium, Republic of Serbia, Denmark, Norway, Brazil, Austria, Australia, Czech Republic...Thank you very much!
So, for my great pleasure I have got orders from different parts of world, but something else happened too. Many e-mails and messages have been sent when chatting about some technical details, meaning of some pictures, the background of heavy metal lyrics and so on. I have been answering to questions about the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The connection between Kalevala and my artistic work has also been in focus.
Today as renewing my online shop I think it would be an auspicious day to start a blog for telling the story behind my work as an artist. You know, sometimes you have to face something which is almost too difficult. At this very moment I have that kind of a feeling. My English is not quite correct. But fortunately I have a lot of pictures! All kinds of pictures! By my memories, dreams, texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos I´m going to tell the total history of my art. Wow! It´s going to be a looong story just because of the fact that before my art there is influencing much more longer story, the art history of mankind! Somewhere there in ancient world have also the tales of Kalevala been created.
So, let´s take the first step!
It was a dark and stormy night...
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