“I was born in 1965 in a place called Saarijärvi in the middle of Finland. Currently I live in a city called Tampere working as an artist. I began to paint when I was about twenty after a one crucial trip to different European art museums. After that experiment my interest for painting grew.
After my graduation in 1992 from the cultural studies and arts at the University of Joensuu I started to paint regularly. As an artist I consider myself as a D.I.Y artist and a self-teaching painter, because art is never ending process for me. My early paintings were influenced by the expressionism and my personal life situations and realities. Those days I searched clarity, purity and straightforwardness of expression. I used to paint by using paints squeezed straight out from the tubes instead of mixing the colours while painting. I was aiming my inspirations and feelings on canvas straight and raw. I used to paint like a bird sings, spontaneously and free.
After that followed the strict period of abstract paintings. My goal at that period was to make paintings that have the strongest effect without any hard efforts. The subjects of paintings were actually faded out as much as possible. The main question for me at that time was what are the limits of painting so that it still can be called a painting. The idea was a kind of deconstruction of formal conventions of the idea of painting. Eventually I found Sumi-e style of painting in December 2006. As an art form, Sumi-e gave me all the elements I needed for creating: Purity, intensity, chaos, power, perfection, discipline and beauty. Nowadays I am painting again with figurative motifs and subjects but the attitude toward painting has not change a bit from the beginning.
My works and pictures are usually made in ink and oil colors. These are the two main styles and medias I´ll use. Lately I have been used also aquarells. My works are reflections to my internal and the external life. In my work I´ll try to put my life-experiences visible as a whole. My surroundings and the presence of people in my life are very important to me, challenging and lively, but they do not appear as recognizable personalities in my works. In my art realism intertwined with fantasy, while maintaining a full-time touch with reality. My works is becoming increasingly “human condition” of humanity and the possibilities of a purely increasingly complex world, targeting with life’s passion, flair, and awareness of the common life forces. My way of working is simple, easy and quite unsystematic. I´ll usually work with traditional tools, brushes, oils, canvases, paper etc. The source material for much of my work comes from all kind of different structures and ideas that surround me, physically and mentally and my inspirations come straight from life, ideas, interactions and the battle of the moments between knowledge and emptiness. I work by adding a slightly more broad outlines of the material and color, and if necessary, I ´ll take them away, again and again – as long as the work starts to communicate with me and responds to my suggestions. It is characteristic to my working as artist that I respect also the so-called “damages” and “coincidences” as part of the process. I’ll try to keep myself open.”
Ismo Jokaiho
