Dimensions of darkness and beauty

"Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters:
united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."
Francisco Goya

"What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the specter which had haunted my midnight pillow."
Mary Shelley

"The waking dream is a kind of problem-solving, it is the way that you address the problem of why am I here? who am I? - all those big, big questions."
Clive Barker, Dreams vs. Nightmares

My drawings are not ugly. No matter what they are about or look like, my intention is to create strong, emotionally complex images. I'm not here just to shock or intimidate.

I've always been attracted to darker works and stranger moods. There are things we don't usually talk about because they're hard to explain. We can feel these things and explore these feelings through suggestive simplicity and mysterious beauty.

Most of my favourite songs and works can be described with words like dark, strange and beautiful. The beauty is in the understanding. I'm attempting to understand these feelings. I don't just give up.

I'm talking about the joy of ideas. Ideas that take you by surprise.
I don't have to ask myself "Wait, am I the right person to have these ideas?"

Hei Xuan Feng

Digital photograph. Rinta-Perälä, 2016.

Taste of transience

"The mad square: modernity in German art 1910-37 presents the key avant-garde movements that emerged in Germany during the early 20th century. [...] Berlin was a potent stimulant for these artists, providing a thriving, vibrant, cosmopolitan culture and generating a kind of nervous, creative energy that sustained artists during the prewar years until the early 1930s."

Edmund Capon, Art Gallery of New South Wales

"All attempts to make the Weimar Republic look more firmly established and stable, even before the world economic cataclysm broke its back, are historical whistling in the dark. It moved briefly through the debris of a dead but unburied past towards a sudden but expected end and an unknown future. [...]
 Even its few years of 'normality' rested on the temporary quiescence of a volcano that could have erupted at any time. The great man of the theatre, Max Reinhardt, knew this. 'What I love,' he said, 'is the taste of transience on the tongue - every year might be the last.' It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death."

Eric Hobsbawm

The Mad Square
Modernity in German art 1910-37
Art Gallery NSW, Prestel 2011

Favourite Finnish music

Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) - classical
The Swan of Tuonela
Elegie
Finlandia
Andante Festivo
Sydämeni laulu (Song of My Heart)

Martti Pokela (1924 - 2007) - folk / classical
Seitakivi (Seita Stone)
Unna ulla nunnu
Marraskuu (November)
Kalevalainen sävelmä (Kalevala melody)

Remu Aaltonen - rock / blues
Kenen yhden vaan
Täysikuu
Viittä vaille kaks

Terveet Kädet ‎–  hardcore punk
Ääretön joulu, 1982

Mana Mana - melancholy rock
Totuus Palaa (Truth Is Burning), album 1990
Kuolla Elävänä (To Die Alive)
Maria Magdaleena

CMX - alternative rock
Pimeä Maa (Dark Land)
Tulikiveä (Brimstone)
Pelasta Maailma (Save the World)

Häiväusko - Whisper Faith, my first wax drawing from 2014

It was made quickly and I felt alive. It opened the door to something thrilling.

This is the original drawing before it was flipped horizontally.

Häiväusko (Whisper Faith) is also the title of my second album.

1. Häiväusko 1 - Whisper Faith 1
2. Häiväusko 2 - Whisper Faith 2
3. Häiväusko 3 - Whisper Faith 3
4. Häiväusko 4 - Whisper Faith 4
5. Parraskappale - Verge Piece
6. Himmerrys - Glimmering
7. Yökkönen - Noctuid
8. Ylitsekiertävä veri - Blood Above and Beyond
9. Sijaton haavelma - Restless Fantasy
10. Varjomuisti - Shadow Memory

Pipe organ classical

https://soundcloud.com/rinta-perala/sets/h-iv-usko-whisper-faith-2014

"The shadowy forms, that seem'd things dead and dead again, drew in at their deep-delved orbs rare wonder of me, perceiving I had life"
Dante Alighieri: Purgatory, CANTO XXIV

Karhu - Bear

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Not a task or a routine

"Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am a living container. Everything I have ever experienced has an animated life inside my body. This is why I'm less worried about the amount of information I'm receiving every day. I don't feel like I'm being suffocated when I'm intuitively collecting things that move and evoke. These things often bubble up in surprising ways.

I've never lost interest in creation, even though I wasn't always sure about the direction. I've always done research based on curiosity, even when other people ridiculed me. The unpredictable energy of creation surpasses tasks and routines.

Musta hevonen - Black Horse

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Breathtaking silent films

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Germany 1920)
Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germany 1922)
Häxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages, Sweden & Denmark 1922)
Sherlock Jr. (United States 1924)
Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, Russia 1925)
A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippeji, Japan 1926)
Faust (Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage, Germany 1926)
Metropolis (Germany 1927)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, France 1928)
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, France 1929)
Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Russia 1929)
The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d'un poète, France 1930)

Vaatimaton - Unassuming

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Silmä - Eye

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

10 gripping horror films from the current millennium

Simplicity, complexity, images, moods, moments, music and sounds. This is a personal list of compelling horror films I recommend. I'm not a critic.

American Psycho (Mary Harron, United States 2000)

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 2001)

Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, Japan 2002)

Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, Japan 2002)

Premonition (Norio Tsuruta, Japan 2004)

The Descent (Neil Marshall, United Kingdom 2005)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden 2008)

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia 2014)

Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, Austria 2014)

Raw (Julia Ducournau, France & Belgium 2016)

Look, I had a vision like this

The Wounded Angel, one of Finland's favourite paintings.

Hugo Simberg painted The Wounded Angel during the summer of 1903. In the autumn that year the painting was included in the Annual Exhibition, and after seeing it, Gallén (Akseli Gallen-Kallela) told Simberg he thought it had been created in a small cottage in the middle of the woods - without caring about the outside world. The Wounded Angel is indeed a depiction of the inner world, presenting simple colours and composition as if to say: Look, I had a vision like this.

(Original Finnish text by Riikka Stewen)

Hugo Simberg
Unien maalari (Painter of Dreams), Otava 2004

 

Weavers, peasants, war and death

"Fundamentally a dramatic artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) brought to each of her works an uncanny ability to evoke human emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions. The reactions of her characters were psychologically true primarily because she tested them on herself. As Carl Zigrosser writes in his Introduction, In a sense one might say that her whole work was a self portrait. From those so labeled, one can follow the traces left by time and experience over the years, from the rounded freshness of the young bride to the lined and seared face of the aged woman. These records do not stem from a superficial narcissism but from frank self appraisal: they are psychological milestones."

Käthe Kollwitz
Prints and drawings
Carl Zigrosser, Dover 2014

Drawing Vampyyri - Vampire in 2016

In this case I started with the word vampire. I then had a series of intuitive, unconscious, emotional ideas. I did a quick sketch, put pencil markings on A3 paper (the size of all drawings) and improvised the final details.

I love comedy

Marx Brothers
Duck Soup, 1933

Lord Buckley
The Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade, 1969

Monty Python
Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1969-1974
Life of Brian, 1979

George Carlin
Stand-up, 1972-2008

Dana Carvey
Saturday Night Live, 1986–1993
Stand-up, 1995-2016

Fry and Laurie
A Bit of Fry & Laurie, 1989-1995

Gynaikalypsi

Digital photograph. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Degenerate Art

"What I have learned over the years - what we have all learned since the end of World War II - is that when a country starts to ban art, it moves on to literature, and free speech, and thought. And then it is only a matter of time before the tragedy is complete and the next victims are human beings."

Ronald S. Lauder
Neue Galerie New York

Degenerate Art
The attack on modern art in Nazi Germany 1937
Olaf Peters, Neue Galerie, Prestel 2014

Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity

Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, Kurt Schwitters, Christian Rohlfs, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky

Why stop now

"Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you."
Robert Henri

"I'd be an ax murderer, if I didn't paint."
John Alexander

"That stroke you are about to make on a painting is as much you as the next word you utter or the next breath you take."
Harley Brown

"The pain passes, but the beauty remains."
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

"We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves."
Paul Gauguin

Living in the current culture, I sometimes say to myself, "Maybe
I should stop, but somehow I can't." Most of us probably know that feeling. Shamefaced, regretful, guilty.

I never get that feeling when I'm reading classic short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino, or watching great films like Rashomon, Rosemary's Baby, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Onibaba. Why stop now when I'm amazed by great and powerful experiences.

I never get that dismal feeling when I'm creating my drawings or music. I also stop being anxious or lonely. There's no need for a hiatus. No need for this constant fear of fading away without a purpose. I know I won't be bored to death in the world of ideas.

I'm doing things I couldn't even imagine years ago. There aren't enough words to describe that feeling.

Revontulia - Northern Lights

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Grains for new seeds

 "Art is the supreme range, high, salutary and sacred; it blossoms. In the dilettante it produces only delight, but in the artist with anguish, it provides grains for new seeds."

"An art that suggests is like an irradiation of things for the dream, where thought also sets forth."

Odilon Redon: Confessions of an Artist

"With proclamations such as 'everything in art occurs through voluntary submission to the advent of the unconscious' and 'my originality consists in putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible', Odilon Redon (1840-1916) established a theoretical legacy which now places him as one of the key precursors of Surrealist thought."

Candice Black: Introduction

Odilon Redon: I Am the First Consciousness of Chaos
The black album - Lithographs, etchings and charcoals
with texts by Odilon Redon, Gustave Flaubert,
Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe...

Candice Black, Solar Books 2010

Piinattu - Tormented

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Favourite art books

Degenerate Art
The attack on modern art in Nazi Germany 1937
Olaf Peters, Neue Galerie, Prestel 2014

The Mad Square
Modernity in German art 1910-37
Art Gallery NSW, Prestel 2011

Alfred Kubin
1897-1909
Neue Galerie, Prestel 2008

Käthe Kollwitz
Prints and drawings
Carl Zigrosser, Dover 2014

Odilon Redon: I Am the First Consciousness of Chaos
The black album - Lithographs, etchings and charcoals
Candice Black, Solar Books 2010

Hugo Simberg
Unien maalari (Painter of Dreams)
Riikka Stewen, Otava 2004

Hugo Simberg
Grafiikkaa - Graphic Art
Sakari Saarikivi, WSOY 1947

30,000 Years of Art
The story of human creativity across time and space
Phaidon 2015

Photography: The Whole Story
Entire history of photography
Det här är fotografi, Juliet Hacking, Norstedts 2013

Puhdas - Pure

Wax crayon. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

15 great artists

15th - 20th century. Mainly symbolism, expressionism, surrealism. These artists have affected me deeply rather than literally.

Hieronymus Bosch
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

Michelangelo Caravaggio
Saint Jerome Writing

Francisco Goya
Witches in the Air

William Blake
The Lovers Whirlwind

Gustave Dore
The Raven: Death

Odilon Redon
Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others

Vincent Van Gogh
The Alpilles with Olive Trees in the Foreground

Theodor Kittelsen
Pesta i trappen

Edvard Munch
The Scream

Käthe Kollwitz
Death Seizing a Woman

Hugo Simberg
Näky (Waiting for Dawn)

Alfred Kubin
Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum

Otto Dix
Melancholy

Francis Bacon
Figure in Movement

H. R. Giger
Necronom IV