Blueberry cake and quiet pictures
In the afternoon I visited Tuire Toivola at Galleria Noste. Tuire chairs the artists' association of Hämeenlinna, and she welcomed me with fresh coffee and a homemade blueberry cake. What warm and open people the Finns are.
Tuire, born in 1973, is a painter. The starting point of her pictures is usually a feeling, she says, and she moves with the seasons between watercolour, acrylic, charcoal and ink. Her formats are deliberately small: small works force you to come close. Since 2023 she has chaired the association, and the gallery we were sitting in exists above all because she pushed for it. When Noste opened at the end of 2024, she told the local paper a sentence I have been carrying with me ever since: we want to do our part to resist the dreary times.
The association itself is older than you would think. It began in 1946 as Hiilikerho, the charcoal club, a drawing circle working with charcoal sticks. Today its members work in studios in an old barracks, and as early as 1962 the association kept up an exchange with Weimar. Looking across borders runs in this association's blood. Which suits this town: Celle and Hämeenlinna have been twin towns since 1972, Celle has had a street carrying its twin's name since 1974, and here there is a Celle street.
Tuire showed me the current exhibition: Hiljaiset kuvat, quiet pictures, watercolours by Joonas Sirviö. Small, quiet sheets about being human and about feelings that stay hidden. Sirviö's path impressed me almost as much as the pictures: first an engineer in metallurgy, then art schools in Helsinki and Dublin, today he lives in Helsinki and paints semi-abstractly, in search of what he himself calls harmony in chaos.
As so often in these days, we had a surprise visitor. In came Tommi Lundberg, caricaturist and portrait painter from Hämeenlinna, self-taught, with a self-description you could not invent better: taivaanrannan maalari, painter of the horizon, the Finnish play on words for a dreamer. And here the circle from the morning closed: Tommi belongs to the caricaturists' guild whose annual exhibition opens the next day at Anu's, exactly where I had discussed my frames in the morning. What a coincidence, and what a lovely encounter.
Together we were invited on, and spent a long afternoon under old trees in the town centre, with a cold drink. As so often here, it did not take long before we were talking about very personal things, about our experiences with art, about working, the art business, running an association. Tomorrow both of them are coming to my exhibition. It is beautiful to see how different our countries are, and how much our worries, needs and hopes are alike.
An afternoon under old trees.“Note from the centre of Hämeenlinna