Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: Journaling with Senses

Moikka! It's Thursday of the third week of the month and that means second post for the new series of posts for the Seth Apter Creative Team. You can find Seth Apter's site here (link) and more about the Creative team here (link). I've included a list of products to the end of the post with links to Seth's own store.

This time I had two sources of inspiration or jumping off points to my projects - senses and Finland. In the course of the three posts I'm creating a piece inspired by a visual, an aural and an olfactory source. And as I'm hoping to keep a Facebook live this coming Sunday where I take you to a small tour around Helsinki, the other source for the pages is pieces connected to Finland. Hoping because of the weather - if it's raining cats and dogs, I'll postpone. But I'll keep you posted!

Yesterday I started with sight and Helene Schjerfbeck (link) and today I continue to hearing and Sibelius. As I mentioned yesterday, one reason for using the senses as well, was that I was taking a trip down the memory lane and found out these older blog posts about inspiration. I wrote a whole series back in 2014 about different sources and ways to use them. Here's a link to the one about music (link).

I could have chosen from a variety of different Finnish composers and various styles. Even though we in Finland have the most heavy metal bands per capita (about 53 per 100 000 residents), I went with classic and one of the biggest. One Finnish saying goes "sisu, sauna ja Sibelius" and I don't even have to translate that. Jean Sibelius has said to form the Finnish national identity and there's people who'd swap his "Finlandia" with "Mamme" by Pacius as the national anthem. I love "Finlandia" and it always makes me tear up, but it felt a bit too obvious and pompous for the musical piece to use as inpisration. "Valse Triste" is another favorite of mine, but I know too much of the back story to it, let's say. So I had a few options. I was immediately inspired by "Andante Festivo", but before deciding the song, I did some quick reading about the piece from Wikipedia (link). What I learned is that the maestro conducted a re-scored version of the original string quartet composition on air as a greeting to New York World Exhibition. Helsinki - New York connection! So it had to be this one! If you want to read more about Jean Sibelius, here's the Wikipedia link (link).

There's some controversy how the piece should be played. When Sibelius conducted the piece it was slower than most interpretations. I went with Sinfonia Lahti version as that Finnish symphony orchestra has specialized in Sibelius. I listened to a version from 2003, conducted by Osmo Vänskä, from Spotify. If you don't have Spotify, you can then check this 2010 version also by Sinfonia Lahti, but conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste from YouTube (link). The both versions are faster than the slower tempo Sibelius used himself.

Maybe you'll see a pattern emerging, finding those common elements I have in each page even though they are so different? I said yesterday that one is the process of first creating a sheet with mixed media that depicts the theme and repeat it in my video today. I also mention the washi tapes - the one I use in all three pages is from a Finnish company called Paper Garden, who design their own washi tapes after found old Finnish letters, wallpaper samples, receipts and other ephemera. I used one called "Aava" (link).

One more element that repeats in all of the three is the scribbles. In these first two I actually use the same paint marker to do them, too. I always use actual words when doing those markings so they look like words but as I alter my handwriting so much, you really can't make out the phrases and sentences. They bring more of a textural element to the page as well as something very personal.

What I forgot to mention in the video is that I thought about adding a stroke of black Izink pigment ink in the mix of the pastels when doing the watercolor -styled thing. That black would have represented the fact that "Andante Festivo" was played at Sibelius' funeral. But in the end, the little splashes of grey and black, which also added to the contrast, bring that idea forward in another way.

Last but not least, let me again provide the translation to the Finnish journaling. I felt that these three pages I just couldn't go with any other language than Finnish! Well, Swedish or Sami would have been fine, too, as they both are also official languages, but unfortunately I didn't have any old books in either. Swedish is our family's main language as three fourths of the family are Swedish speaking Finns - that is my husband and our daughters.

The journaling on the page is loosely translated: "To be or not to be? Circus princess - her favorite pastime is to gaze upon the passing scenery while the train puffs forward and to think, plan, dream."

Thank you for stopping by today! Please be back tomorrow for the final post of the series! It's again a bit different take on the theme - and maybe not so many links! Stay safe everyone!