I’m a 31 year old self-taught artist from northern Finland, from the land of the midnight sun we call Lapland. I have always loved drawing and I was lucky to be born into a family where my artistic tendencies were encouraged. My father was a businessman who couldn’t draw or paint himself, but who loved art, bought art and praised everyone else’s abilites. My mother is a construction draughtsman, when young she worked for one of Finland’s top architects. She has also painted porcelain for 20 years.
I started out with colored crayons as a kid, moving on to graphite and charcoal as a teenager and doing some experiments with pastels in my twenties. Then my father, who had always been there for me and pushed me forward, died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 54. It broke my heart and my spirit. I stopped drawing for 9 years. One spring evening as I sat home utterly bored, something made me dig up my drawing supplies. After doing nothing for 9 years, I found out I could draw better than ever before. Go figure. Then came the shame of wasting a talent I had been so graciously given. I decided to see where it would take me, if I took my art more seriously.
I currently work with pastels, colored pencil, graphite, charcoal, watercolor and gouache.
I live with my husband and plenty of pets. When I’m not painting or drawing, I like to try my hand at different crafts. I have done cross stitching and other embroidery for 10 years, recently I started needlefelting and making teddy bears. I also occasionally paint porcelain under my mother’s instruction.
I’m a university drop-out, I studied rehabilitation as a major, along with special pedagogics and philosophy. I had to quit due to health issues. I have difficult endometriosis, hyperprolactinemia with prolactinomas (small tumours in pituitary gland in brain) and psoriasis.
