Young Sailors

2019

Oil colour on 20 x 30 cm fiber board (MDF), in blue vintage frame.

It was a particular pleasure to do this painting. It's a reprise and effort to capture something of the atmosphere, people and places of my childhood summers. Many of the photos from those days have originally been taken with such poor cameras that scanning and digital restauration won't work miracles.

Painting from a photo, however, frees your hands in many more respects than pure enhancement ever could. In this painting I made my brother and I older by a couple of years and also painted a suitable sky which is completely blown-out and faded in the original photo.

In this scene we're enjoying one of so many boat trips along the shores and islands of lake Näsijärvi (close to Tampere, Finland), in the first half of 1970s. Our father was a sworn fisherman all his life, brought up by the river Mill Brook. We had an old-fashioned and simple boat that had its engine in the very middle and leaked constantly so that we had to bale every now and then. Often we stayed the whole day on one of the many islands. While we brothers were allowed countless exploratory adventures into the wild our mother would prepare a meal on the cliffs by the water. She truly was our Moominmamma. I cannot help but admire the trust and acceptance that our parents showed us during those adventures.

DONATED to my mother