Levels

oil on hard board. 60 x 70 cm

This is what happened to the plan of making my own interpretation of Renaissance type of Madonna and Child painting, people who have been looking at my journal and sketches may have noticed me mention (see: [link]). Madonna got swallowed by a bunch of people and abstract shapes.

I started work on this last May, and there must be something like 20-30 layers of paint at places. Might be more. Seriously.

Some people at the group commented that this resembles stuff by Samuli Heimonen ([link]). They didn't mean it in a bad way, but it turned out to be something I was very sensitive to, and made me angst about the painting for a few weeks.
(Samuli is brilliant, and definitely one of the premier painters in Finland right now, but he didn't develop in a vacuum either, and has mentioned that he owes technique-wise a lot for instance to Pasi Tammi [link] [link] , and taken for instance the motif of people inside glass bubbles from Paavo Paunu, who was also teaching at Orivesi in 2005)

Surely, it's allowed to take influence? I should probably drop the group of people motif entirely... as that kind of was influence from him, I have tried to take it into a different direction.

Anyway, despairing over the Madonna painting, and the I didn't wanna be a copycat of Samuli Heimonen stage add up to an unusually large amount of angst and pulling teeth, so what you see here was not quick and effortless. But I like it in the end. You get very rich colours with multiple layers.