About Tarja Laine

Originally from Finland, I have been living for more than twenty years in Amsterdam. Here I took a five-year training in classical visual arts at the Wackers Academy of Figurative Art, where Sam Drukker was the supervisor of my final project. The technique based on close observation that I leaned at the Academy still is the starting point of my approach, characterized by both classical and contemporary methods. As a result, my paintings often end up halfway between figuration and abstraction. They are a response in colour and line to the materiality of organic forms in the visible world. Nature is often my source of inspiration, yet my paintings do not merely represent subject matter. Rather, my aim is to understand my own way of looking at the natural world, its colours, patterns, forms, and rhythms. By lack of figurative interpretation, my paintings are exercises that aim to show what happens when you stop and look more carefully. When you watch how the world unfolds in unsuspected colours and shapes, while thinking and feeling about subject matter. I am also interested in the creative process itself, which I aim to visualize by deliberately leaving parts of my paintings ‘unfinished’, for instance. I am intrigued by the quote attributed to Paul Valéry according to which “a work of art is never truly completed but abandoned”. So my paintings regularly examine at which point such ‘abandonment’ of a work of art can take place at the earliest. Not because the creative process has become tiring or annoying, but because the painting itself compels its own abandonment. Even though I exhibit my work regularly at galleries, art events, and art fairs, I was drawn to Artfinder because I share their philosophy of accessibility of visual arts across boundaries, outside the confines of museums and physical galleries.