Artist's statement

I paint painful themes with vibrant colours.

Feeling of detachment, connection and compassion are the basis of my artwork. I try to capture a moment that contains a fundamental feeling or insight: a moment that we recall when we are thinking about a certain chain of event or period in life. The last morning coffee before that final argument. Sunday, when everything fell into place. The photograph that is too painful to look at, but you always find yourself staring at it.

I often paint from an individual perspective. Still, every personal experience is interlacing with communal, psychological and social phenomena. There are certain things and experiences people don’t talk about, but which they share without knowing it. In my art, I connect these individual experiences as part of a bigger picture.

With my art, I aim to evoke viewers to recognize these phenomena in their own mind, life and environment. I want to enable conversation on hushed up issues and offer compassion through my art. I want to make the invisible elephant in the room visible. I want to explore the separate issues and compose a collective experience.

I begin my work process with photographs I take of ordinary everyday situations. I use these as reference pictures. When I paint, I break the composition and subject of the original photograph: place, time and people become unrecognizable. In my artwork, I combine human figures with abstract and surrealistic elements. Through an intensive way of working, I can create an emotional bond with my work. My working is also intuitive - I interact with the work in process, and the final form and feeling the work provokes can be surprising. At best, my artwork can reveal something new about how I relate to the world.

CV

English CV coming soon.
You can download finnish CV here

Contact

If you are interested in buying my art, please contact me via email or  by filling the form below. You can also suggest collaboration or commissioned work, or send me feedback.

email: saara.tikka@gmail.com
instagram: @saaramariatikka