This week, I have a fun video for you. In the video, I create a watercolor greeting card and talk about my obsession of painting flowers.
The card is A5 in size, so about 6 x 8 inches and I have painted it on watercolor paper.
My smallest brush is very narrow and I could have coped with two brushes. In the course Freely Grown, we use the similar process, but finish with colored pencils, so it’s much easier than working with tiny brush strokes.
Watercolor Flower Obsession – Watch the Video!
In this video I confess how goal-oriented I am about painting flowers but also talk about the importance of play.
In the video I talk about a boutique that’s not a commercial thing at all, vice versa:
“I believe that we can create the best boutique out of our own art. Imagine your workspace as a paper shop where you sell hand-painted cards, bookmarks, hand-drawn stickers, patterned papers – everything that is already art as such, but from which you can look for inspiration for bigger works. I have even come up with a name for this kind of personal shop. It’s Boutique of the Heart. There’s only one customer in the Boutique of the Heart – you, and one seller and manufacturer – you! The longer you keep the shop, the more you learn to love the things you draw and paint yourself.”
My message is that the essence of art is in play. Thus no matter how high you want to reach, you can still create art with a playful attitude and have your Boutique of the Heart. I know there are art instructors that solely focus on the techniques and those who are about fairytales and imagination, but I feel I am something between. I want to create art with people who want to move forward in art-making, but who also love imagination and free expression.
We can have obsessions, but there should always be time to play too.
Happy Halloween! This year’s Halloween artwork combines painting and programming.
A screenshot of an algorithmic artwork “Modern Vanitas”, programmed in Javascript P5.
This week, I have a video that has excerpts from the artwork I programmed. The program picks four of my paintings at a time and forms a Vanitas-type arrangement with a skull, fallen crown, extinguished candles, and withering flowers – symbols of our transience. The program has 50 paintings from 2021-2024 to choose from. The music for the video is composed by me, representing a conversation about the temporary nature of life.
You can watch the video bigger by pressing the last icon on the menubar.
If you are interested in seeing more of this artwork, here’s a longer video that explains the Vanitas concept and shows more samples.
I designed the 3-dimensional shapes and then blended the paintings on them by programming.
Painting by Programming
One of my oil paintings is also Vanitas, so the theme is very familiar to me. The transience of life has both horror and beauty, maybe emptiness too that goes well with the machines. The way the computer paints with me produces fascinating details.
We can continue the tradition of Vanitas paintings and use any technique to make our own versions.
What kind of version would you create?
P.S. This month there was a digital art exhibition “Deform and re-form” on the screens of the Helsinki Central Library Oodi. The exhibition called “Deform and Re-Form” was organized by the Finnish National Gallery’s digital team. Oodi is a very popular big library building, with lots of visitors every day. It felt great to see my artwork “Queen of the Night” there.
Even if a part of this year’s art is digital and painted by programming, I still keep creating traditional art as well.
Although I usually aim for a grandiose atmosphere, my art is a lot about insignificant everyday moments.
For example, when I …
… gathered apples from our apple trees
… walked in a rainy storm with the dogs
… admired autumn colors from the car window.
Or when I smiled at the hopefulness of the roses in the front yard and promised to give them a home from a painting before winter would surprise them.
Floral Watercolor Dreams
When I paint in my small studio, my mind tells me that I am a flower painter in 17th or 18th century Holland. I imagine lovely high windows, old costumes, and the clatter of shoes on the street. I imagine the flower market and how I will assemble a bouquet from the best finds.
But in reality, I’m just an ordinary Finn whose everyday life pushes through the brush.
There is a huge gulf between me and the master painter of the 18th century and yet I still jump into it again and again. Every once in a while, I decide to stop painting flowers because there’s so much more to paint. And yes, if I look at my oil paintings, my favorites don’t have many flowers. Nevertheless, the flowerless period never lasts very long.
When I go to the garden, the Flemish master is waiting for me there. He says: “It’s time to practice again, Päivi” I answer: “Yes,” and then assure him: “One day I will master this art of painting flowers.”
Still, I know that life can be far too short and far too mundane for me to ever reach that level. But like a rose facing winter, I take out my button and wet the paper again.
This piece was painted on Arches Hot Press watercolor paper. It has a very smooth surface so it’s great for a detailed painting, but I also find it a bit challenging because every stroke shows!
What’s Behind the Title?
Even if I painted autumn watercolor flowers, can you also spot the apples?
This piece is called “Satokauden kuulas” and I think it’s a beautiful title in Finnish but a bit complicated to translate. “Satokausi” means harvest time and “kuulas” is a romantic word for translucent. But there’s more. “Valkea kuulas” is an apple variety that is called White Transparent in English. So I think that the suitable English name is “Harvest’s Transparent” even if it doesn’t quite have the same romantic sound as the Finnish version.
This piece has a strong autumnal feel: bright colors meet more muted tones on a dark background.
This week, I share my latest new media art and thoughts about my career as an artist. This is a sequel to the blog post called Beginner’s Video Art that was published last month.
Unstill Still Life – Video Art
The video above is my latest artwork “Unstill Still Life.” I have done this largely by programming. I have developed generative algorithms that create and alter shapes. I have designed the individual shapes with a 3D modeling program called Blender. The models and the code are put together with the Unity Engine which is a software environment for developing games.
I have taken inspiration for the colors and surfaces, as well as the concept itself, from Fanny Churberg’s 1876 painting “Still Life with Vegetables and Fish.”
I love old paintings, so this challenge was made for me. It’s so interesting to examine the brush strokes and think about the 3-dimensional shapes that they are related to. And I have so much to learn in making generative art, that I need small challenges to keep heading forward.
I Will Continue Painting, But …
I am still going to continue painting traditionally but I also want to start a career in new media art. I want to bring back my skills in programming from the years when I was a software engineer and use those for creating art. I also have a degree in Industrial Design that helps a lot with 3D modeling. The grant that I received from The Finnish Cultural Foundation has enabled me to develop my style in new media.
But all this is not only exciting but hard too. Do you know that feeling that comes when you have to start life over again? There is enthusiasm in the air, but also some “oh no”.
Building a CV
For a full-time artist, most opportunities are based on a CV.
That was not a problem when I graduated in software design in 1996. I thought: “I have plenty of time to grow my CV.” Then, when I graduated as an industrial designer in 2009, life seemed to be halfway over, but I was able to get quite a decent CV by combining some old and new projects.
When I started working as a full-time visual artist in 2014, I didn’t think about CVs at all at first.
The picture above is from 2015 when most of my art was in art journal pages.
But when I moved forward in painting, the reality hit me – it was very hard to get accepted to exhibitions and organizations without a CV. Mine was practically blank at first, and it has taken a lot of time and effort to add rows to it.
The picture above is from last summer at the exhibition organized by The Albert Edelefelt Foundation. See more pics in this blog post!
New Media Art – New Career?
And just when I thought that life was almost over at the age of 55, this new media digital art came into my life and it hit me – I’m a beginner again with an empty CV. So, I need and want to participate in challenges, competitions, and exhibitions, to get accepted again. And I want to believe that I still have time to create this new kind of art, not only paintings.
Screen capture of my video artwork. View from the back of the scene. Some leaves of the big plant are connected to an invisible virtual camera that moves around and sends a mirror image to them.
I learn new things about generative art every day and I am amazed that I have been given this long life to experience it. Gratitude is the overriding emotion that emerges from this new beginning. I am lucky in what I have seen in the development of information technology and what I have been able to develop and be involved in developing in the past. I want my future CV to tell the story of a girl who wanted to become an artist as a child, who fell in love with computers as a teenager, and who finally has the artistic vision and the technical tools to combine the two.
Looking Back Enables Seeing Forward
If you have been following my blog for a while, you must have noticed that my blog posts are often self-reflective like this one. Visual art-making needs self-reflection too. It’s useful to go back and see how things have changed to make future changes and take steps forward.
With the newest course Liberated Artist Revisited, I invite you to paint with me – to follow directions from Paivi many years ago, and then create more with the current Paivi. At the same time, you can ponder, how your art-making has changed and will change.
