Maaria Märkälä

I am a bicycle woman and a landscape painter living in Espoo, next to Helsinki, and having a studio at Cable factory, Helsinki. I used to travel to discover inspiration but nowadays I feel like flying is bad for the planet and air travel is usually the largest component of the carbon footprint of frequent flyers. That makes me enjoy more and more of all the extreme seasons that Finnish nature has to offer: everything between the warmest summer, midnight sun and the arctic darkness, quietness and snow. Nature is in a constant state of change. It is a gift from the first light green plant to appear after snow to the great explosion of autumnal reds, browns and yellows before winter comes. My work of arts are seen in several public and private collections in Finland and abroad.

Pessi Rautio The Editor-in-Chief of Taidelehti, Finland: extracts from the book Places For Being Happy:
"That is why Märkälä's method of painting, reminiscent of expressionism (one of the centres of which Berlin happens to be) is consistent; the thick, almost edible, colour in her paintings manifests that the painting is not trying to hide in the background. The paint as a substance, the form of which reveals the speed in which it was spread, manifests in every fraction of a second of the viewing session that what we see here is a part of the world reconstructed with paint, possibly improved: witness the miracle of the illusion. The magician shows her tricks, and, oddly enough, this is exactly what makes the trick so impressive, as in puppetry when the puppeteers are visible ".
"Paintings created in a studio may contain several layers that the viewer knows nothing about; in the bottom there may be, for example, bursts of frustration familiar to everyone, forming a base for the landscape. Märkälä wants to paint, to bring out the good on the top, so the process must end in something hopeful, full of oxygen and life, light, even what is beautiful ".
"To Märkälä, the world includes objects, good ones that simply must be depicted through painting, not least because they make such good paintings".