TAULU KESÄSTÄ (2021)

Taulu kesästä (English title: A Summer Painting) is a collaborative painting project between myself and my grandmother Terttu Kivikankare. My grandmother painted a lot over the course of the late 1980s to the early 2000s. For her painting was a creative counterbalance for her otherwise very mechanical and mundane work life. In more recent years after her retirement, she has directed her energies towards more practical tasks, like maintaining her house, garden, and plot of land in Oksalanpää, Uusikaupunki, and activities like painting have become desolate.

I spent a large portion of my summers in Finland at my grandmother’s. My family moved abroad to Japan when I was 3 years old, and we would only return to Finland during the longer summer breaks. It was during one of those first summers that we returned to Finland that my grandma – still in full enthusiasm for her art – painted my first ‘proper’ painting with me.

Taulu kesästä began as an oil painting that commemorated the shared painting moments and explored how my grandmother and I are connected through our art. My grandmother could take as active or inactive role in the painting process itself as she wants, most important to the process was that we spend time together and had discussions. Discussion about her childhood and life in Uusikaupunki, parenthood and becoming a grandmother, her memories of me as a child and whatever surfaces.

The painting is representational of my grandmother and I painting together, based on photographs taken of us in the summer of 2005. This painting holds vibrant colours reminiscent of childhood summers and will bare a stylistic resemblance to the paintings that my grandmother used to paint.

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The painting is closely tied to my Bachelor's thesis project Golden Places.