pause, reflect, and experience
I am Finnish. That explains more than it should.
I spent fifteen years running a graphic design studio in Los Angeles — working for companies like Apple, Dell, and Golden Globes — before deciding that commercial art had taken enough of my life and none of my soul. I relocated to Julian, a small mountain town in the hills 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, and neither did I anymore. It was there that my practice shifted fully into fine art, and where I began to understand what painting was actually for.
Eventually I found my way to South Campos in Baja California — discovered San Felipe in 2012 and never quite recovered from it. The light there is unforgiving. I find that appropriate.
I am self-taught, which means no one told me what I couldn’t do. Four decades of art will do that — sharpen the instincts, quiet the noise, make the brushstroke certain. My background in graphic design never left me entirely. Structure, visual discipline, the ability to see what doesn’t belong — these things live in the work whether I invite them or not.
Then came seven years of a legal battle I did not choose and could not walk away from. Forgery. Fraud. A court system that treated documented evidence as a scheduling inconvenience. I am a graphic designer by training — I see what others miss in a document, and I missed nothing. I kept working. I kept painting. And I kept meticulous records, because the Finns have a word for what happens when you refuse to be erased: sisu. It is not optimism. It is something quieter and considerably more dangerous.
The result is a book — At the Helm: An Artist, a Courtroom, and a Foreclosure Built on Forgery. My editor says it has everything a film needs. I am choosing to believe him.
My paintings came out of that same period — horses, water, storms, wild systems — because they move without permission and endure without applause. They do not ask for favorable conditions. Neither do I. Each work is an original. No prints, no repetition, no compromise.
My work is held in private collections worldwide.
Art became my escape at twelve. I asked my dad for a giant roll of craft paper and a six-inch brush. He didn’t question it. He bought it. I moved the furniture off the walls in my bedroom, taped paper to three walls — my first triptych — and shut the door.
It was the dead of winter. Dark. Freezing. Wind howling like it had opinions. I opened the window anyway, put on a wool sweater that I had knitted, turned on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and painted for five straight hours. I disappeared into it. Finished a winter scene and loved it. Nervous about the disaster I’d made on the floor, I invited my parents in. They loved it too.
That moment never let go of me. I still jump in full force. I still disappear into the zone. I still feel the pull of I must create. And yes — Vivaldi is still involved.
