Tuula Heikkilä-Özgür - Wayfaring

The most important factors for me in the act of painting are color and the state leading into painting. My paintings are like sceneries, because in it it's natural to form the state of painting. My works of art are sceneries of either my living habitat or of what I have experienced. Yet my paintings aren't about a certain landscape. I don't plan my paintings beforehand, but I paint according to what the painting suggests to me. I am interested in painting the scenery from within so that the viewer could feel immersing into a painting and to experience one's own kind of an environment.

Through painting I study the human living in one's environment, where freely growing and human built environment are always mixing with each others. Lines of the paintings depict the motion of our surroundings, in this moment or in longer time span. My earlier paintings originate to a Vantaa suburb, Louhela, but exhibition Wayfaring begins of my journey to Nepal in the Spring 2008. On a month long trip I spent a part of the time in the capital Kathmandu and part by making trips to North and South Nepal.

On the background of my paintings there is the thought of how in our city environment the buildings and nature are strange to many people. There is no personal connection into those. Especially in the mountain villages of Nepal people, forced by the circumstances, live in a close connection to their environment. Buildings and items in those mountain villages show the touch of both human hands and time. Both in cities as in mountain villages the Buddhist and Hindu religious signs and colors are visible in everyday life in temples, doors, clothes and skin, prayer flags flapping in the trees trees. Buildings and their statues have surfaces which live according to human touch and changes of weather. Then they become a part of the life and environment of people.

Therefore in addition to great mountain and forest sceneries my attention on my journey was caught by different surfaces, single items. In the Pilgrim pictures I have aimed through multilayered mass of paint and chalk to achieve similar affection as the timely surfaces of dusky temples.

This exhibition has been supported by: Arts Council of Finland, Uudenmaa Arts Council and Vantaa city.

Artist meeting July 4th, 2009 at 2-3pm