15.1.—8.2.2026

I paint at home, even though I have a studio. The studio is for the textile stuff.
I paint, as I did in art school, from life: still lives, portraits, interiors. Nothing especially sensitive. Still, I feel naked when painting. Everything happens so fast. A painting appears, I am grateful, in awe, and then within minutes I ruin it.

I place Gloria, a small, wooden skeleton doll in the lap of Emma´s sculpture. I look at the stilleben, a pietà. I find it a bit boring, the colors muddy on a dark November day. I get a mirror my daughter left here when she moved out, and place it behind the pietà. It is now St Anne, the third. Daylight is fading fast. I turn on the harsh kitchen lights, and my features almost disappear in the counterglow.
I am impatient, and rarely do any scetching. Often I regret it. This composition does not work. I try to mend it with weight, adding color. In the end I open a tangerine and place it next to the two sculptures. I paint it on top of the dark colors of the table, trying to restore the light of the plywood.

I am a figurative painter, but painting itself seems to be an abstraction.
What are these things, this space, this image in a mirror, all fitted onto a flat surface, brushed on with liquid plastic?
What is it that I´m looking at?
The doll, the sculpture, the tangerine and the mirror, these familiar objects, form a strange constellation. I know that I must have been painting it, since I am here alone. I try to track the path that led up to this particular painting, but cannot trace my steps. Is this what I saw?

Pauliina Turakka Purhonen, b. 1971, studied painting but usually works in textile materials. Occasionally returns to painting, enjoying the fast-flowing ups and downs of it.