Art Projects

1. CRYING MARY -project

How many Crying Marys must a man paint, to understand that women can get tired too? I started painting Crying Mary, as a punishment for myself, because I had not understood or wanted to understand my wife’s fatigue. Through these everyday icons of mine, I began to look for answers to questions; can a man survive if a woman gets tired?
Is the woman allowed to get tired?
What would women like to cry / tell to the Crying Mary?

This is the first one. I had no idea what will happen after this.
When Ambrosius, Metropolitan of Helsinki, saw my Crying Mary icons, he invited me to hold an exhibition in the cultural center of Sofia. From there the exhibition was requested to Family Counseling Center and to Sweden.
Actor-director Eija Ahvo, pictured above, saw the exhibition and the texts the women had written for my works. She directed Mary’s tears – a monologue play for ten women in the play. Tuija Rantalainen has composed songs to that monolog play.

3. SAVED ONES

When I noticed how many people throw away books today, I decided to give books another life. I started to make book reliefs.

4. FINSKA PÅ SVENSKA -project

Everything started from this drawing. Suddenly, I decided to write text next to it in Swedish, Finland’s auxiliary language. This occured 27 years after my school years – the last time I had used Swedish before it. ”Autumn is coming, but girls are having fun.” It looked so good, that I decided to write a little Swedish text next to all of my drawings. From that moment onwards I started my journey to the Swedish language.

5. PARLER L´UN À L´AUTRE – TALK TO EACH OTHER, illustrated french finnish poem dictionary