Proximity

Proximity /prɒkˈsɪmɪti/
noun

nearness in space, time, or relationship.

“Proximity” by Tiina Lilja (2020) embroidery and oil paint on board

I’ve had some great news last Thursday: I’m finally going to be off furlough and back to work as a studio painter.  It has been a privilege to dedicate this much time for making my own art, but to be completely honest, I am really keen on returning to a form of normal in September.

Unlike my husband who has been working from home throughout and following lockdown, I have needed to set my own challenges during the Covid-19 crisis.  I would definitely say I was in a bit of a creative slump before the pandemic and the only way to move forward towards the new normal was to change the way I make art.  Focussing only on the positives, the last several months have made me more confident in exploring new ways of making visual art as well as tackling more overtly personal subject matter than ever before.  The first of these experiments, begun in early spring and finished in late July, is Proximity: a piece about my father who I haven’t been able to see since last summer.

proximity detail

“1986” and “Proximity” by Tiina Lilja

Proximity is a mixed media piece, slightly larger than an A4 sheet of paper, combining two oil painted miniatures sitting within an embroidered frame.  The portraits, one featuring a young boy around the age of 7 and the other of a slightly younger girl with her head cropped out, are those of my father and me.  In the photographs my painted portraits are based on, we are wearing the same pair of tasselled leather trousers, although by the time I had the honour of doing so, nearly 25 years ago now, they had been cut into shorts.

proximity detail

proximity detail

proximity detail

The reason Proximity took so long to finish was largely due to my indecisiveness.  Having finished the embroidered cover, largely using cotton thread and acrylic yarn, I simply could not choose what I wanted to paint.  Overtly Covid-centred subjects would have felt false – I am not that type of an artist and everything else seemed too mundane.  I left Finland over ten years ago now, but I have never felt this far away from home before.  Of all the things I have missed during lockdown: family, friends and my home in France… it was my dad Juha who I missed the most.  He’s a typical Finnish bloke, not the type to video chat or hang around social media and I have really cherished our long phone calls during this difficult time.

For better or for worse, Proximity is my main lockdown piece.  I have already improved on some of the ideas I first explored with this piece; others I have completely abandoned for now, but it shall always have a special place among my artworks.  I turned thirty just a week ago and the most important thing I am trying to implement, having reached this milestone, is to spend less energy on worrying about what other people think of me.  I lost quite a few followers off my Instagram when I started posting images of these types of mixed media- and textile pieces, but I’ve gained new ones since.  Life is too short to obsess over social media, and not worth living if you are just going to regret every risk and change of direction.

So: take risks, create and don’t lose sight of the things that matter the most – that’s the new normal public service announcement from me to you.

Tiina x

A word with the Micromanager

Anybody else struggling with motivation lately?

Seems like this is all I talk about these days; I am not really built for the anxieties of the new normal.  Where I tend to be pretty good at setting my own goals and sticking by them, lately the uncertainty with work and life in general has really started to affect my productivity.  Add in a generous helping of self-doubt and you end up with this hard-to-shake feeling of existential dread.

Not the best of times to revisit a finished artwork, I know, but here we are.  Remember “1997” – I wrote a blog about the meaning behind the picture some weeks back and logged it as finished on my studio inventory.  Case closed.  Yet I have not stopped thinking about the wee thing.  It is a piece that means a lot to me, being a sort of self-portrait and all, but I kept thinking it should somehow be… well, better.

1997 before revision

1997 by Tiina Lilja (2020) oil on board

This is by no means the first time I have started again: just last summer I completely repainted one of the faces in Two Brides.  It was a calculated risk that paid off, but not an easy decision to make at the time.  The materials I work with, mostly oil- and acrylic paints, are non-reversible.  They can be removed using solvents or brute force for sure, but generally speaking you cannot restore areas that are overpainted once the paint has dried.  A strict one-way system of sorts.  The reason a conservator would use specialist pigments in restorative overpainting is so that their work can be safely removed when necessary.  As an artist however, a maker of things, this is not a practical way to build artworks.

Personally, I thought the multi-coloured elements I added on top of the black and white portrait in 1997 were a bit heavy handed.  I did not want to remove this layer fully, but rather integrate it better with the portrait underneath, by making areas on the face more translucent.  I could have added more paint, or sanded down parts of the coloured top layer, but I opted out for a riskier strategy of a solvent, turpentine to be precise.  The main reason I felt this painting was not working previously, was the dull precision of its parts, making it all too uniform for my taste.  By choosing to remove some paint in this unpredictable way, I managed to re-introduce character that I felt was previously lost.

“1997” by Tiina Lilja (2020) oil on board

1997 by Tiina Lilja (2020) oil on board

I am really pleased how it turned out, but again it was not a decision I took lightly.  At the end of the day, any artist is responsible for their own quality control.  Is this piece sign-off quality?  Could I be displeased about it simply because I feel down about most of my work just now?  Is the time used reworking this piece time/money well spent?  Question yourself before taking steps that are irreversible.  Measure twice, cut once etc.

If you need to think whether an artwork is finished, it probably is not.  Conversely, there is a fine line between sensible quality control and micromanagement.  You can set any picture (or a problem) aside and return to it when you are feeling better/more confident/re-inspired.

Or simply, ask a friend – if there’s one thing I have learned from the Covid-19 crisis it is that we’re all in this shite together.

1997 – on Seductiveness of Nostalgia

My family, coloured pencil on paper, 1994

NHL-cards and Extreme Ghostbusters… that pretty much sums up the year 1997 for me.

Although Nokia was already in the process of forging their mobile-millions in 1997, Finland was far from being the tech-savvy start-up capital of the world it is known as today.  In fact, most people were barely back on their feet following the early 1990’s depression and the subsequent collapse of the Finnish economy.  Between 1992 and 1997 unemployment had hovered between 12-17%, but things were looking up.  Not insignificantly, our boys took home gold at the 1995 Ice Hockey World Championship Games, hoisting the nation’s collective self-esteem to an all-time high.  On a more personal level, I started school a few days short of my seventh birthday in August of 1997, rocking a blond mullet and clothes sewn by my mother, with dreams of being an artist one day.  We were a few years short of moving out of the council flat I was born in, shopping was paid in Finnmarks, calls made on GSM and you needed to wait two weeks for your selfies to be developed and delivered to your door.

Time works in strange ways during those early years of your lives.  Indian summers and white Christmases; the full Monty.  Most people remember but an idealised version of their formative years.  I certainly wasn’t aware of the archaic economic and socio-political structures unravelling around me.  For a child such as myself growing up in a sleepy regional town in the South West of Finland, the winds of change blowing through my small nation were easily drowned out by the gentle sway of its ancient forests.  Kids are like that I suppose, adaptable.  My dad was home a lot when I was small and I loved it.  It took me years to figure out he’d been on furlough or had lost yet again another job alongside tens of thousands of young men like him.  The average unemployment figure might have been around 15% in 1994, but for builders like my dad, it was over 36%.

So much for the good old days.

Why is it then that we turn to nostalgia when times are hard?  Is it really a coincidence that Christian Dior struck gold with his “New Look” featuring ultra-feminine, conservative looks reminiscent of La Belle Époque in 1947?  Just ask George Taylor, he introduced us to the Hemline Index as far back as in 1926.  For the lockdown season of 2020, whether you are shopping at Primani or Prada, there’s a new look in town:  Long floral dresses and puff sleeves.  Comfortingly feminine, non-threatening – nostalgic.  And it’s not just the fashion you need to look out for.  Retro has been big news in graphic design for some time now, but when the big multinationals like Unilever or Nestle’ whip out their heritage packaging, buckle up Bucky you’re in for a ride.  A sure way to spot the economy is in the toilet is knowing you are being tempted to buy biscuits by enrobing them in the warm fuzzy happiness of nostalgia.

“1997” by Tiina Lilja, 2020, oil on board – work in progress

I am not saying nostalgia is inherently bad for you.  It is, however, incredibly seductive to remember only an idealised, simpler version of the past.  Jamie Windsor talks about the problems of nostalgia in much more elegant terms in his video essay simply titled “Avoiding Nostalgia”.  This yearning to recall an ideal past void of modern evils is a powerful marketing tool and harnessed so sell us things as well as influence our political decisions.  “Make America Great Again”, remember.

The art I have been making lately is riddled with nostalgia, but I did not set out to paint nostalgic imagery just to introduce you to my mullet, circa 1997.  People do not yearn for simpler, happier times in a vacuum.  I am talking about the mother of all nostalgia, the cardinal reason why we so crave that idealised past: fear.  Fear of uncertainty, fear of change and fear for what the future will hold.  He has been my constant companion in the studio for these past few months.

“1997” by Tiina Lilja (2020) oil on board

No filter more powerful is yet invented as that of the perspective of a child.  Somewhere between the Pogs and Dr. Bombay, I do remember the recession of my childhood: from the bread-ques (the Finnish expression for foodbanks) hand-me-downs and the evictions.  I suppose those were the things my parents would have called the new normal at the time.  It must have been a balancing act of royal proportions, but they pulled it off.  Out of many wants and withouts, we always had a roof above us, food and each other.  Although it took me years to stop feeling inferior in the company of those more affluent, I started school in the August of 1997 confident in my ability to achieve anything my heart may desire and largely unafraid.  A sparkling new cog eager to take their place in a machine being built on top of the old.  The fear of uncertainty, rejection and loss crept in much later, alongside the responsibilities of an adult and a need to find my place in this world.

As a painter, I need to make sense of my surroundings through the images I create.  If ever there was a constant I wish to cling on to when our world has turned upside down, it is art.  And I hope the art I am making gives even a fraction of the solace it has awarded me, to you and others stuck in the twilight zone of the new normal.

Keep calm and create,

Tx