Selections

Hi, this is your local [iippo]. I am here today (and every day) with a little message about art. Y'see, I like art. I like looking at it, I like reading it and I like reading about it. I also like making it and writing it, and eating it and selling it and buying it and attending it and photographing it and...

The idea is simple. It's exactly the same as my previous wikipage The Elfwood Selections, where I would find and share something found in Elfwood. Except this is all art everywhere. So what I would ask you to do is put the page on watch and enjoy seeing works of art. I will also write my thoughts and what I feel about them, and you are free to enjoy or ignore those comments too. You can also link me to art, but I don't promise to feature or not feature it.

Past selections will be stored nowhere except past versions of the page.

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Stiina Saaristo

The first artist I wanted to select for sharing is Stiina Saaristo, because accidentally coming across her work was the originating spark for the idea of this new wikipage. I so badly wanted to show everybody what she does. 

In essence, Stiina Saaristo discusses roles of women and womanhood through her exaggeratingly grotesque self-portraits. She works huge and she works detail - and she works in pencils. This alone blew my mind away, to think that her pieces are about nine feet (3 metres) square and done completely in pencils. I saw a photograph of her working process: she wears the clothing she will portray the figure in and hold a small mirror to see the part of her that she will painstakingly be rendering onto the paper. This artist is a trooper.

It was hard to pick one of her pieces to feature because I couldn't find one that I felt summed it up what I really found in her (which I why I really recommend you to image-Google "Stiina Saaristo" and see her other works), but this one - Little Monster - was the first one that properly got my attention.

It shows her usual grown-up child/woman figure, who always seems so angry and frustrated. And you would be too, if you'd grown up dreaming of princes and fairy castles and thinking that all the happiness in the world was in that one lace-and-silk dress that you could dance happily ever after, and then found out that life was - well, that *points at Saaristo's pictures*  So it seems that this one has decided to do something about it. Though as so many women have found out before her, there isn't much to do but stab rats with bread knives... We do what we must because we can.