I make things because I don't know how not to.
I am Finnish. That explains more than it should.
I’ve been making things for most of my life — painting, glass mosaics, photography, sculpture, design, and now, apparently, books. The materials change. The impulse doesn’t. I make things to understand them.
It started with a six-inch brush.
I was twelve when I asked my dad for a giant roll of craft paper and a six-inch brush. He didn’t question it. I moved the furniture out of my room, taped paper across three walls, shut the door and painted my first triptych. It was the dead of winter. Dark. Freezing. Wind howling like it had opinions. I opened the window anyway, put on a wool sweater I’d knitted, turned up Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and painted for five straight hours.
I disappeared into it. I still do.
Before I painted for myself
I ran my graphic design studio in Los Angeles, working for companies including Apple, Dell and Golden Globes. It was a good career. Eventually, it wasn’t enough.
I moved to Julian, a small mountain town outside San Diego, where I stayed for twenty years. The quiet was deliberate. The oak trees and open sky had no interest in deadlines or client revisions. Neither did I anymore. That’s where I began to understand what painting was actually for. Not decoration. Not filling a wall. A place to put something that had nowhere else to go.
The canvas became the counterweight.
Eventually I found my way to South Campos in Baja California and discovered San Felipe in 2012. I never quite recovered from it.
The light there is unforgiving. I find that appropriate.
Then came eight years of a legal battle I did not choose and could not walk away from. Forgery. Foreclosure. Courtrooms. Documents. A system that treated documented evidence as a scheduling inconvenience.
So I painted. Horses that move without permission. Oceans that refuse to stay still. Storms, wild gardens and ancient creatures built to survive.
The work changed because I did. The paintings aren’t illustrations of what happened. They’re what I made instead of breaking.
Self-tought by design.
I am self-taught, which means nobody taught me what I couldn’t do. That has occasionally been useful.
My work has moved through graphic design, ceramics, photography, glass mosaics, sculpture, painting and books. I’ve worked small enough to hold something in my hand and large enough to need scaffolding. The medium has never been the point.
The idea tells me what it needs. Then I figure out how to make it.
What I make now
Every painting is an original. No repetition. No compromise. No painting something because it happens to match someone’s sofa. The mosaics are built one piece at a time from glass, color and light. The books are what happens when the story refuses to fit on a wall.
Different materials. Different stories. Same artist. Same stubborn need to make something out of it. My work is held in private collections worldwide.
