My work is rooted in the folklore of my Finnish upbringing, and my love for geology and nature. I work in clay, oil paint and watercolors. My paintings are more about a sense of place than the physical landscape. Rather than re-creating a place or a landscape, I aim to express its abstract qualities.

Blue is dominant color in my palette, especially Ultramarine Blue mixed with Raw Umbra and other blue pigments. I find the blues also in landscape and nature: ice, snow, sky, cloud, sea, lake, river, water, distance, horizon, shadows. There is blue moment between the dusk and night; the fascinating radar profiles of ice layers; airy backlighted snow pits; scary glaziers I hiked on in Greenland hoping not to fall in crevasses. For me blue represents cold, melancholy, moodiness, memories, old photos, and photo negatives. Blue is also color of my Siamese cats’ eyes.

Lately I have been admiring the blue shadows of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings. And remembering when I saw first time Sean Scully’s painting Sea Wall in 2004 in Finland. Klaus Kertess wrote in his book about Joan Mitchell that if she “…had had to choose but one color…certainly have been blue.” Like for Mitchell color blue is not only color but now preferred one for me too.

Yves Klein patented 1960 his own color blue: International Klein Blue (IKB). No, I am not thinking of doing that, I want to have it all, all the hues of the blues.