ARTISTS´STATEMENT
Through her work, Marja-Liisa Torniainen aims at combining ingredients that repel each other and seem controversial. While loyal to her own chosen path,
she is always curious to learn new things and regards spiritual development the most important objective in life. Work, in this sense, even though important as such, only carries instrumental value. The results of work – the artwork for an artist – remain as proof of the journey to develop. Work done with gusto and passion teaches its labourer and carries us on to a new, surprising level and towards more demanding tasks. People keep finding new possibilities within themselves.
As an artist, Torniainen is first and foremost a painter – also when she takes photographs. Colour is her passion, and beauty her ethical value. Her works mainly consist of drawings, paintings, and photographs. As a writer, she feels that she is working through a totally different part of her bearing compared to painting, even if she usually writes about visual arts.
As a student, she started to admire the sophistication of the cultural heritage of India. She did not believe to be able to learn anything comparable. Since then her wishes have come true; she has had a chance to study rare arts and knowledge, such as Kashmir Shaivism and yantra painting along with her yoga studies. All this has placed her work as an artist under a looking glass. A tantric attitude towards life does not entail a type of escapism but an understanding that liberation is only possible in this reality.
“ When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils. First of all, it is ever-existent and neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes. Next, it is not beautiful in part and in part ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so affected by position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others.”
In her work, the artist depicts the all-reaching reflections of this beauty.
*Thus taught priestess Diotima of Mantinea to Socrates. (English translation taken from http://logorrheic.wordpress.com/2010/0/26/diotimasocratesplato-on-loving-beauty-and-the-good-life/) Plato on Loving, Beauty, and the Good Life, 3rd tetralogy.
Translation Copyright Virve Juhola 2012
Through her work, Marja-Liisa Torniainen aims at combining ingredients that repel each other and seem controversial. While loyal to her own chosen path,
she is always curious to learn new things and regards spiritual development the most important objective in life. Work, in this sense, even though important as such, only carries instrumental value. The results of work – the artwork for an artist – remain as proof of the journey to develop. Work done with gusto and passion teaches its labourer and carries us on to a new, surprising level and towards more demanding tasks. People keep finding new possibilities within themselves.
As an artist, Torniainen is first and foremost a painter – also when she takes photographs. Colour is her passion, and beauty her ethical value. Her works mainly consist of drawings, paintings, and photographs. As a writer, she feels that she is working through a totally different part of her bearing compared to painting, even if she usually writes about visual arts.
As a student, she started to admire the sophistication of the cultural heritage of India. She did not believe to be able to learn anything comparable. Since then her wishes have come true; she has had a chance to study rare arts and knowledge, such as Kashmir Shaivism and yantra painting along with her yoga studies. All this has placed her work as an artist under a looking glass. A tantric attitude towards life does not entail a type of escapism but an understanding that liberation is only possible in this reality.
“ When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils. First of all, it is ever-existent and neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes. Next, it is not beautiful in part and in part ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so affected by position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others.”
In her work, the artist depicts the all-reaching reflections of this beauty.
*Thus taught priestess Diotima of Mantinea to Socrates. (English translation taken from http://logorrheic.wordpress.com/2010/0/26/diotimasocratesplato-on-loving-beauty-and-the-good-life/) Plato on Loving, Beauty, and the Good Life, 3rd tetralogy.
Translation Copyright Virve Juhola 2012