An Actual Photograph, Ladies And Gentlemen

So here's a little something of the Finnish mythology photoshoot that I'm almost happy with.

SIlver Bride

I've ordered a fine art canvas print of this photo so when that arrives we'll see what a touch of oil paint will do.

Updates

Let's get organized.

After months of researching, developing ideas, agonising, wanting to give up and being both excited and dulled I have reached the point where both of my ongoing art projects consist of actual stuff - pictures and video that is.
Am I content?
No.
But I am glad that I have at least something concrete as opposed to mere ideas.

Anyhow, let's talk about the video/dance piece first.
So, I edited this rather earsplitting darkwave noise music piece - would feel odd to call it a song but I guess that's what it is. I genuinely do not understand people who enjoy that genre. I took me several painful hours of fiddling with GarageBand to get that 5 and a half minutes into almost bearable 2 minutes but I did it. Another element I made was a contemporary dance choreography - the very first I've ever done, which involves a lot of smashing against the floor or otherwise brutalising myself.

My legs after two days' shooting.

The music and the motion had to be quite violent and even unpleasant in order to portray the forceful surge of discomfort aroused by a panic attack. An interesting aspect for me in this project is that I have not studied dance or performing arts, nor sound editing or film. I have been practising dance more or less frequently since a kid but I don't have a formal training really and I'm by no means anything like a pro. I also don't know rat's ass about editing moving image hence I have a friend with whom I'm working. Well currently she's supposed to be editing and I'm supposed to be doing nothing.
To give an apt update about the present situation is therefore quite impossible because after we finished filming I've only seen a few screenshots. I hope there is enough material to work with because booking the place we were filming in would most likely be problematic as it seemed to be quite popular.

Another benefit in having someone else than myself editing the video - in addition to the fact that I simply couldn't do it - is that I am so self-critical that I would probably end up leaving out a lot of perfectly satisfactory stuff for some silly, superficial reasons that are only perceivable by me in the first place. I don't often feel like I should be give credit for any so called skill of mine - and least of all dancing. But an important thing to know about this project is that it is not first and foremost a performance piece. Even though the emotions and sensations of not being able to breathe, of being scared, of panicking are brought forth through an act of contemporary dance, the choreography itself is not the main part of this. It is not essential that the viewer is able to see how each movement is executed, or that each movement is executed technically flawlessly. It is the overall visual experience gained through seeing - and hearing the final video piece that matters.
As I said, I don't know where the project is going right now and that's all alright. At least the picture quality looked good and I really like the lighting we accidentally stumbled on carefully constructed.

Have some screenshots.

To the other project.

Remember when I rambled about Finnish mythology and awesome feminine powers of nature?
A few days back me and my model, respectably, packed our bags full with makeup items, warm clothes and food, and took a bus to the Nuuksio national park here in the Southern Finland. Our intention - primarily my intention -  was to take some pictures in the beautiful, golden evening lighting and then at dawn in a more colder, silvery sunlight leaving the dark hours of the night for sleeping by the fire under the stars. Mind you, that's almost exactly what we managed to do.
The evening photoshoot went really nicely except that I'm not as happy with the pictures as I could be. The night went equally well and I was even able to sleep a couple of hours. Would probably managed more but I kind of wanted to keep an eye on the fire lest it should die out.
However, in the morning we had to abandon the shooting plans entirely since the universe decided to make my friend extremely unwell, and so there was nothing to do but leave. This turn of events was admittedly upsetting for me because now we don't have time to do a re-shoot before both of us have to hop on a plane and travel to our unis in the UK.
Regardless of this small drawback I do intend to carry out the rest of the plans I've set for this project. Right now there is some photoshopping to do - quite a lot really, and then I want to get one image developed on a canvas to imitate an oil painting. And then I hope some friend of mine has in their possession gold and silver paints and is willing to let me use them a bit as I'm going to attempt at making the canvas-printed photograph resemble a traditional oil painting even more by adding some details with paints on top of it.
But first, the challenge of looking at my photos objectively and choosing at least one that meets my standards. Trust me, it is easier said than done.

At least the nature was stunning.

And now I shall go to languish in the agony of inadequacy and lack of talent of any kind.

Last Minute Panic

That thing above is like my life philosophy so the point. And now I should talk about my other ongoing art-shit-project of randomness. So, I'm a photography student and the first thing to be said about this other project is that there is really nothing photography related in there. Other than the camera that is capable of shooting both still and video. But my course is called Photographic Art so basically anyone can do anything they like - and I like dancing.

Dancing is like one of the most natural ways of expressing my inner feelings. Why don't I then study dancing for the love of God? Mainly because I'm not talented enough. I don't have a formal training or anything so applying for a dance degree wasn't even a choice really. However I've always been kind of tickled to do something dance related in my art in one way or another. This summer I finally got a realisable (?) idea, with which I've been working on for a couple of months now. And because I'm a cheery person it is about panic.

I have some personal reasons as to why deal with panic, but I wont go deep into them just now. Let it be said though that I don't suffer from panic disorder myself. I have a condition called vocal chord dysfunction and I have had several hyperventilation attacks during the course of years but a full on panic attack with a fear of dying or depersonalisation I have never experienced.

What I'm attempting at doing then, is to create a video piece with the help of my lovely film student friend, of the modern dance piece that I've been trying to put together these last weeks that would sort of bring that inner emotional chaos of panic on the surface.

And actually, I don't feel like giving away anything else just yet because I have literally nothing ready at the moment, and I have not slightest idea what will come out of this setting.

I've put all faith in the last-minute panic and it's inspiring effects.

Morning Randomness

I was enjoying my breakfast this morning on our tiny balcony, and then this happened.

And my tea.

I've always loved spots, and here is someone who does even more than I do: Yayoi Kusama.

Have a vid as well.

Some Finnish Gods

First of all, how very typical of me: create a new blog to keep your art babble separate from your personal babble; then quit the art babble before it even started. Last time I blogged here was months ago, and recently I've seriously been munching whether I'd better just delete this blog once and for all. Nevertheless, I'm going to give it another chance and see if it leads anywhere. In all honesty, I am an extremely disorganised person/artist/student/whatever hence no matter how much I'd like to keep some sort of a diary or log about my progress and ides I never seem to succeed. You see, most of my projects begin as a massive, tight lump which I start to unravel and take in parts to see what it holds. It's like I know what I want to achieve in some ideal, abstract level but to actually get there, I need to de-construct the idea. Not sure if that makes sense but there you have it - I suck at explaining myself.

Anyhow.
I currently am working on two very different projects, the success of which is very much in the mist. I do not know if either of them will some day be something worth showing but I guess that's the case with pretty much everything creative.

But enough with the mindless rambling and to the point.
Both of my projects are untitled as of now mainly because I suck with naming things. Well, I have a possible name for one of them but I'll see about that when (if ever) it is finished.

Le Untitled Project #1

So, Finnish mythology has never been a point of interest in my head up until recently. And I can't even tell you why now. It just happened. I suppose it is the sum of several things in my life in the course of the past year. First of all, I got a friend in my university course who is interested in wiccanism and witchcraft and all supernatural. She sometimes talks about that stuff, and while I don't quite buy all of it, admittedly it is fascinating. Then I have another friend back in Finland who's drawn to nature religions, archaeology, mythologies and all that stuff. In addition, she is the kind of person who won't cease to be hyped over the things she finds awesome, thus getting at least me excited as well. Lastly, my own search for some inner peace and balance has lead me back to yoga and through Eastern philosophy to their mythology which, alike traditional Finnish religion is polygamous.
Not having conducted a major collating research between Eastern and old Finnish religions I don't count myself qualified to inform you whether there is anything else along with the aforementioned polygamy that binds those two together so let us leave the subject right there.

What comes to Finnish mythology, I have acquired some knowledge of its anatomy and characteristics in a time span of a couple of months using both the lovely friend of mine, and the excellent library collections available in my home town as sources of reference.
To start with, Finland is a geologically quite a big country, whilst its population reaches just under 5,5 millions. So basically we have few bigger cities, a lot of tiny ones and then forests and lakes. Even the so called 'bigger cities' are just fractions of what the world's buzzing metropolis are, and everything is just covered with those trees and lakes and fields according to what part of the land you are exploring.
Historically, Finland has never been in a state of power and wealth, nor in the front line of doing anything great (except for giving women the right to vote, and staying away from the Soviet Union, hooray!). The control of this area has been either in Sweden or in Russia but from my comprehensive school history I always got the impression that the Finns rarely gave a damn about their kings. And I also, suppose that whoever was the ruler mainly took the Finnish folk as simple, harmless countrymen (which probably was quite right too). Anyway - as I'm drifting from the topic - Finns have somehow managed to preserve their special relationship to nature through different times. Also, being a wide area, there isn't such a thing as one true Finnish mythology since everything that we know about the subject today is a mixture of the beliefs from the West, the East and Lapland (the Northernmost parts), not to forget the early Christian influence that also arrived from both the East and the West with the crusaders some time in the 900's.
Seriously, I need to google these details all the time since I never concentrated in my primary school history classes.
However, my point of interest isn't what Finns believe in today, but what they used to believe in before Jesus became their spiritual guide.

I said that we - or rather our ancestors - didn't have one organised belief system. What we do have instead is something called a national epic, The Kalevala, which brings together the oral folktales and beliefs form all sides of Finland. The guy who wrote down all those stories, songs and spells was faced with the same problem as I am now that I've looked deeper into the spiritual world of ancient Finns: there are countless gods, goddesses, mythical creatures and such who have many names and many beliefs associated with them. So, what this guy, Elias Lönnrot, was bound to do, was to draw some lines together and create archetypes that could be presented as the main characters of the Finnish myth. Obviously, today's ethnographers and whatever those guys are called, don't appreciate this simplification too much because The Kalevala only shows one man's interpretation of the ancient religion in Finland. Fortunately, I am not a historian/someone who ought to know about these things proportionately more than I do, but a photographic artist or art student whose job is to present her interpretations about things she finds remarkable.

I also don't know how to be concise and how to summarize so bear with me.

What my books have taught me so far is that in the core, the mythological world of the ancient Finns is built upon respect for some sort of a mother Earth; not one mother but several womanly beings who have birthed and care for everything that is alive and growing. I won't go into details about these goddesses because defining and separating them from the sets of characteristics occurring in old tales and spells and whatnot is still in progress for me.
And as I've emphasised - there are no specific characters recognised throughout the old religion of the folks of Finland. I understand that villages and bigger areas used to have their own special tales to tell and rituals to follow. To be able to make up whole characters demands merging together stories from different origins.

The important point here is the - perhaps unusual - female foundation of the mythical universe where the men might be the heroes messing about, but the sky and the earth are being taken care of by womanly, motherlike beings, goddesses.

In my project - we're finally getting there - I intend to produce first and foremost beautiful and fantastical portraits of personifications of chosen Finnish goddesses. As they are almost exclusively protectors and creators of nature and living things I want to embrace the environment in the photographs as well. This being the grand plan, I've been searching for suitable scenes for those mythical creatures to appear in - have even found a few. I have an eager model to portray the characters, with whom I need to go for some prop shopping as soon as possible.
All in all, I think I have all the bits, I just need to tie them together and cross my fingers for good results.

And now I can't be bothered to talk about that other project because I've been sitting here attempting to unpick my great idea and deliver it in a literal form with as little success as you can experience yourself.

Visually, what I'd like to achieve The Loveliest Girl In The World is a project that really hits close to home. Conceptually it is completely a different thing since I'm just some art student but that book is actually like art therapy, empowering photography being the correct term here. Go have a look.

Behind the Colours

What's with the painted faces that I posted a couple of days ago?

Lemme tell you.

The two things asked of this project were that it would be portraiture and done in colour instead of black and white, which we've been doing for the three previous assignments. From the very beginning I felt that I wanted to cling strongly to the colour aspect of the briefing and use it as a vital element in the images rather than just treating it as a technical demand from the course leaders.
As colour holds an overwhelming amount of meanings and interpretations, it felt natural to start by reading about different colour theories. I found a perfect book for my needs from our precious library and got on studying philosophy and psychology of colours - understanding about one third of all that I read. Gotta love theorists for making everything a problem.

yeah, dis be ze cover of ze book

Colour psychology is widely exploited these days - mostly in advertising, fashion and business - to make people feel or react in a certain way about something. This obviously is based on the assumption that colours affect us somehow. The Internet is full of helpful websites that offer 'knowledge' of the meaning and impact of different colours on different people. What colours should you use in the logo of your company if you want to emphasise such and such qualities. How should you decorate your bedroom to encourage peaceful sleep. What colours best suit your zodiac sign.
A lot of this seems to me a bit too feeble to be reliable, but is nonetheless interesting in a way. And don't get me wrong, colour theories are mostly based on scientific-sort-of research. This research though, relies on psychoanalysis and the notion of the unconscious, so if you're not a fan of Freud and the friends you're probably not a fan of colour theories either.
People respond to different colours in different ways and cultural heritage has a defining role in associating colours with feelings for instance (in Western societies black is traditionally the colour of mourning, whilst in Asian countries that title is held by white). Whether or not one's personal qualities can be deduced through colour tests is another question as is the effectiveness of colour therapy, which basically is a treatment using certain colours to provoke certain emotional and physical responses in the patient. It's all rather foggy and dodgy in terms of straight, scientifically proven facts but I find all of this mysticism around colour symbolism kind of fascinating because after all colour does have quite an important role both in our personal lives and globally.

So I took some colour tests that promised to give me an accurate description of my personality and my current emotional state. In major part they hit the nerve but like Internet horoscopes, these descriptions are so vague and interpretable that one automatically reads them to fit their own situation ignoring the bits that don't quite make sense to them.
Anyway, here are three different tests that claim to have a reliable scientific background.

Colorgenics
ColorQuiz
Test Color

Go and see for yourself to form an opinion.

Then, at some point I decided to paint my face with fingerpaint.

What an ugly yellow colour cast we have here.

Looks like a mentally deprived person just found the hospital's art supplies and went wild.
But it was much, much fun and I like the substance-ness of the paint - if you look closely you can see how it's thicker on some parts and thinner on others. I also like how the facial features almost disappear under the layers of colour.
After this experimentation I got convinced that face painting was definitely going to be my way of bringing colour as a central element into the project.
I read a little about a Hindu festival where colour is in a major role of the festivities, and how it brings people from different social levels down together to celebrate.
I also studied tribal face painting traditions, and learned that in their tradition body and face painting have multiple meanings, and that different colours and patterns symbolise different social status, age or religious ritual.
Of course, face painting has also been used as a camouflage or to frighten the enemy at war. And in Africa and Australia where the midday sun is quite a grill, a layer of paint protects the skin from burning.

Face fashion from America, Australia and Africa.

A funny thing is that our dear fashion industry every once in a while borrows the tribal face painting aesthetics in their ads to promote an idea rather than the product.
Or maybe they do want us to do our faces like this. I don't know.

raaahhh, I'm a wild beast

I can't actually move my face muscles cos of these layers of foundation and stuff.

And the we have Lady Gaga of course.

Can't read my painted face.

I guess they're trying to make the customers believe that when using these and these products or this and this brand they'll become wild and free and groovy like exotic birds or something like that. And as of Lady Gaga -- I think we can leave it at that.

So, now I have this idea that when you fill every inch of your face with something, you cover yourself and kind of hide behind this mask but at the same time you show something of yourself for the world. Like tribes separate themselves from others with characteristic patterns and colours, and the members within a tribe separate themselves from each other. They show something of their status and rank.

But in my project the models were free to choose their colours and what they wanted to do with them. I didn't control the process at all, just laid out my fingerpaints and a mirror and told them not to make too much mess. Then I sat them down on a chair before my camera without a shirt to center the viewer's attention only on the face and its colours. I asked my sitters to have a neutral, non-emotional expression and to look straight through the camera.
I don't know what I expected but I'm really happy with the results so far.
First of all, it was absolutely fascinating to see how differently - and yet similarly people reacted to the task. I also didn't expect a distinct difference between genders, but it's there: while most of the guys didn't really have a plan but just sank their fingers into the paint and smudged it all over their faces, girls tended to draw dots and stripes and create these harmonious and geometrical paintings. Since my approach had been quite impulsive even though I'm a woman, I didn't expect to see anything as clear as I did.
Interesting, fascinating, exhilarating. And in the end, quite touching as well - like my one of my tutors noted in a seminar a couple of weeks ago. There really is something that seizes me when I look at the finished images. With the silly looking colour mask, unemotional face and the brightness of the background my models look even spiritual. I can't quite put my finger on it but somehow they move me.

And I have no idea of what I'm going to call this body of work.

Colour Craziness

I have a colour portrait project going on at the moment. It involves fingerpaints, which I think is pretty awesome. I'll give a proper explanation of whys and hows later on but here be some visual material that I've been working on. They're actually film photos and I prefer the paper versions over the scanned ones but no can do since I couldn't be bothered to spend hours perfecting these as I already did that with the negs today.