I write in margins

Great News for the Finnish Classical Art Got just message from Facebook wall. Ateneum (National Gallery of Finland) pages for the Google Art Project have been published today. Google Art Project's ambition is to collect the best of the national treasures around the world and bring them alive to everyone in the world. What is specific for such a art lover than myself is that you can get closer to the paintings through the internet than in real galleries. You get the details of brush work and colours better from the high resolution images than from the real ones. Today, Google Art Project have artwork from 230 different galleries. Eero Järnefelt's Under the Yoke photographed with Google's Gigapixel technique. You can go even closer. Click the link below. Thank you for the Great Name, Our Ancestors! Now, when pages opened in the internet we can congratulate our ancestors when they named our National Gallery as Ateneum. It's a bit odd name for the Finnish ar...

I remember my first encounter with illustrations of Science Fiction and Fantasy landscapes. It was in a library in Eastern Carelia near the Russian border. I had found these huge American illustrated books presenting architecture, vehicles and landscapes of the worlds which did not exist - but which made me wish they would. Today I saw some images of Asian concept architecture on my Facebook friend's wall. Suddenly, I had a dejavú and started an hour long journey to the worlds which do not exist. I have travelled beyond stars, to our unknown past and our frightening future - and again these fantastic drawings got me out Science fiction and fantasy has always presented images of something unexisting or presenting a dream where our world should be heading to - or dystopy of a future we are heading with our current lifestyle. Most of the Art Critics doom these paintings and illustrations as a pulp art. Figurative painting, even of fantasy worlds, has not been taken seriously by...

Last week I held a lecture on comics in The Knowledge of Art course. While thinking of examples I would speak on the class I popped in to my old favourite comic books: Corto Maltese stories by Hugo Pratt . I bought my first Maltese books in Danish while I worked in Stockholm. The first one was Det gyldne hus i Samarkand. So, I spent some good times with comic books which definetly can be classified as literature. Corto Maltese is a soldier of fortune living in a turmoil of the early 20th century. Many stories handle the chaos and culture around Europe and the world before, during and after the First World War. What happens to an idealistic individuals during a brutal war where commanders neglect the human rights and see their subordinates as cannon food? Pratt's stories are epic and even romantic stories of a time when the foundations of the post modern era was laid. Extremely well written and full of accurate pictorial historical data. Costumes, vehicles, architecture are ...

Rudolf Koivu (1890 - 1946) is one of the illustrators which has affected me most. Even if Finland's most known illustrator died already in 1946 there is no one which has escaped Koivu's sensuous lines, magical creatures from childrens' stories and Christmas cards. I claim, Koivu is for Finns the same than Carl Larsson for Swedes or Mucha for Czechs. Or perhaps even more than that. Last summer I visited an exhibition full of Koivus drawings to different Childrens' stories. It blew my mind out. Pictures to the stories by Grimm, Topelius, Andersen were all presented. Thinking of the fact that the world was not full of images Koivu's characters, trolls, sceneries and mystical creatures were amazingly original ones. Unlike today's illustrator who has grown in a world full of images, Koivu had to bring these creatures from his mind. That is a thing which often has been neglegted. My first memories of Koivu, though I did not know that by then, were the sensuous cov...

Tate modern was one of the London's Millennium projects. Converting a huge power plant built in the 1960's to a modern art museum. Most of the general collection exhibitions are free for the visitors and for the special exhibitions you pay either £15 or £17.50 depending on whether you make a donation. That's for the adults. Kids get half price. Reserve plenty of the time to go throught the exhibitions. Men of the family chose the free exhibitions, dames the special ones. It took well over three hours from both to their parts through in a relaxed phase. Collection was impressive. Definetly worth visiting. Links: My daughter's blogpost on Tate . Tate Modern (coming up from 21st Feb: Roy Liechtenstein. Even the exhibition book (was on sale during Xmas at Tate) weighter like 2 kilos.

Edvard Munchs wine and spirit bottles are found reports Norwegian Broadcasting Company NRK earlier today. This artist -whose painting "The Scream" became the most expensive painting ever sold in an auction* - proved to be the real artist. All bottles were empty when found. Archaelogists wish to find out how Munch had it live in Nedre Ramme farm where the artist spend his live from 1910 until his death in 1944. Thinking of the amount of the empty bottles, something can be concluded very easily. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream was sold for $120m at a Sotheby's auction in New York in May 2012. Owner of the Ramme farm and the financer of the archaeological excavation is the very same Petter Olsen who sold the painting in the auction. Edvard Munch was here. Photo: Petter Olaisen/NRK Related links: NRK: Graver fram Edvard Munchs vin- og spritflasker Sotheby's- The Scream

The painting hanging on the wall of the country house has always intrigued me. Definetly it belongs to the mid 19th early 20th Century tradition of horse paintings. Horse art became a major genre in the British decorative painting in the 19th century. Themes by equestrian and hunting horses and scenes became very popular - and also owners of great horses wanted their animals painted. Also the first class French artists like Degas, Delacroix and Manet contributed to the scene. However the most visible - as a cultural phenomenon - were hundreds and hundreds of paintings by English artists like Ben Marshall, John Frederick Herring and many more which produced paintings as their main artistic theme. Often scenes of the horses were presented in Romantic landscapes. One sub-niché of this popular theme were to portrait horses and dogs together. It took of with the fox hunting scenes to the typical stall pictures which is presented in the picture in our wall. Dog and horse resting in t...