Two questions for today's visual artists

When did you know you wanted to be a visual artist?

How would you describe the relationships you have with different works of art?

Forming Moons - my debut film

I have now shot 50 % of this experimental silent film. Poster will be added later.

Writing, direction, filming, production, performance, design, artwork, music and soundtrack by Tero Rinta-Perälä.

My top 10 films of all time

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
Dreyer is one of the directors I most identify with. This silent film feels modern and extreme.

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
Visually engaging venture into dreams, nightmares and symbolism. Unified and iconic.

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
Marx Brothers comedy packed with boundless invention and energy.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
Films about identity, isolation, one person against insuperable odds fascinate me. I love revisiting this cinematic playground.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
Intimate expression of anxieties, fears and mental distortions.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
A film that emphasized the character and idiosyncrasy of everything surrounding the plot. Still a refreshing experience in a world polluted with explanations and information.

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
Argento's films have a darker tone, but at the same time he's openly having fun with ideas. He has a special way of inventing spellbinding sequences.

Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
The first film that genuinely made me want to create and design my own film. I first saw Eraserhead when I was in my early teens and I fell in love with the world and the images. What impressed me was the way the images were built by the filmmakers.

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
Even uncannier and more haunting than Deep Red. This is what I imagined when I started reading about Italian horror. Fortunately Suspiria gave me more than that and I'm very familiar with the daring soundtrack.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Strangely captivating. Not the scariest, but an interesting one. I've always been sensitive to atmosphere and I'm also attracted to this film because of my family history.

The way

"You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

T. S. Eliot: East Coker (Four Quartets)

Workshop painting

Acrylic. Rinta-Perälä, 2018.

Interpretation of a poem by Arvia MacKaye Ege.

I'm still drawing primarily, but painting is something I like to experiment with. This one took 2 hours.