"And suddenly he realised he had become
a coward.
Nobody could help him. He didn't need any help.
He wanted his courage back, but there it was,
flying high above the ochre fields,
looking at the clouds and smiling."

I made a small version of the giraffe, just to see how to adjust the pattern. The final creature will have bigger feet and a thinner neck. I will also add ears.

the unruly lady

Layer five

Layer four

The faces are almost ready now. They have between six and eight layers of paint each, and I am going to design bodies for them today.

I don't enjoy writing about my work online, so I will stop it after finishing these paintings. To me, keeping an online blog is almost like a really awkward way of keeping a diary. I don't want to write anything personal, yet during the actual process of painting, I don't have anything impersonal to write.

After finishing these paintings, I will include only images and short captions of text in the blog. Hopefully that'll work better.

Layer three

Layer two

Layer one

Finally things are starting to get a bit more organised. I received a slot for my thesis show: 13th-19th May, 2007. It leaves me eight months to prepare.

I am still working from the same photo I took of my friend, Anne, a few years ago. This time, I have manipulated the photo slightly, so that it does not look like Anne anymore. Instead, the resulting photos are portraits of imaginary people. (I have attached a couple of the images above.)

I now have 50 different versions of the same face, and I am planning to paint each of them. Once painted, each face is going to get a soft body made of stuffed, white fabric. They'll be a group of body bags.

The idea of painting portraits of illusionary people makes me smile. Traditionally, portraits are regarded as mirrors of the soul, capturing the essence of a person rather than her looks. What happens when the person does not even exist?

Time to go home and take Marcel the cat to the graveyard.

PLEASE VOTE FOR DAVID GRAHAM!

My boyfriend, David Graham, is one of the shortlisted artists in the Saatchi & Guardian competition.

It would be great if you voted for him through the following link:

David Graham on Guardian

"PUT A THOUGHT TO AN IMAGE, NOT AN IMAGE TO A THOUGHT"

I have spent a week trying to figure out what to do for my degree show, treating it as a specific project - planning to design each piece, and making the works accordingly. I was thinking of asking people to send me a photograph of their face looking the way they would like to be remembered after death, and painting them. I would then have made their bodies of stuffed, white fabric.

I got bored before I even started.

It's about time to admit that I cannot work in projects: I simply need to get my hands dirty and produce something concrete. The visual comes before its theoretical explanations.

So, let's see how this pans out. I'm on my way to the studio to prime some MDF.

Hello!

Encouraged by my new friend, and a fellow winner of the myartspace.com South of France competition, I decided to start keeping a blog on my studiowork.

I am a visual artist from Finland, currently finishing my postgraduate studies in art at SIUC in Southern Illinois. In a year's time, I am hoping to have moved back to Europe, either Scotland or Finland, and to have found work in the arts. This blog will follow the preparations for my final show at SIUC.

The image above is a photo of my installation, Poison Dwarfs. The faces are painted in oil, and the bodies are made of wood. Here is a link to my website if you want to check out my work: http://www.ilonaniemi.com