BEING THE ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE AT THE MOOMIN MUSEUM: woooee!

Hello friends! As some of you may already know, the Finnish Illustrators’ Association (Kuvittajat Ry) recently published a blog text I had written in Finnish about my experience at the Moomin Museum this past November. In case you do read Finnish, you can find the full original article here. However, there are many people that do not read Finnish… so I wanted to share an English version on my channels. At the very bottom you will also find a digital version of my full residency sketchbook. Just be gentle… I’m being very open and vulnerable here!

All in all, the residency was an incredible experience that I know I’ll be reflecting back to for years. I’m so proud of my Finnish roots that allow me to get so close to Tove Jansson’s legacy of work and walk in the footsteps of Finnish literary and illustration history. It’s kind of a big deal!! The Moomins have been famous worldwide for decades, but it’s hard to explain how huge they are here in Finland. You’ll just have to visit in order to find out.

HOME AWAY FROM HOME: first steps in Tampere

On the first day of November, I embarked on a short but thrilling journey to the Moomin Museum from my city apartment in Helsinki. We packed a rental car to the brim with all the supplies I needed* to live and work in Tampere. Though we made an early start when we arrived at the Haihara residency the house was already covered in the hazy dusk of early winter. The classic Finnish cottage that looked so cute and small in the distance was towering in front of me as I was unloading the car. It would be my home away from home for the next month! I had always dreamed about living in a red cottage. In Finnish we call them “Mummonmökki,” which translates to Grandma’s Cottage… And living in one certainly feels like a Finnish rite of passage. It hadn’t sunk in that the whole thing was just for little old me to use. The deep red paint looked grayish between tall dark pine trees and the blanket of clouds that cradled it for the evening.

*I did not need my enormous 11x17 scanner. It took up half the rental car. It was ridiculous.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN TAMPERE?

I hadn’t visited Tampere very much before the residency. I knew it had a city-amusement park like our capital Helsinki, which I had visited a few times as a kid on school trips. And it was the home to one of the biggest Finnish textile brands, Finlayson. That was about it! But I was ready to learn more, especially after I read an article about most Finns preferring Tampere to Helsinki as a place to live. Of course I did know that the famous Moomin Museum was in Tampere, but the last time I had been to there was in 2017. I was visiting Finland for the first time after a long stint of living and studying in Philadelphia. The museum had been opened to the public earlier that year, and I remember studying Tove’s tiny ink drawings in awe. Now, in 2022, I was curious as ever to see what was new, and lo and behold… There was a whole new addition to the museum called the Observatory with changing exhibits!

Now I can proudly say that I know Tampere as well as I know Helsinki and Philadelphia! Even though my cottage at the Haihara Art Center was significantly outside of the central area, the route 10 bus back and forth from the museum was convenient. For a smaller city, Tampere had an incredibly vibrant and bustling restaurant culture. Often it felt like I couldn’t get a table without thinking ahead and making a reservation! In addition to visiting and working at the Moomin Museum, I toured other museums around Tampere (no reservations required!). One of my favorite attractions was the Pyynikki Donut Cafe and Observation Tower, where you can climb up the tower with a warm donut and a hot cup of coffee to enjoy the birds-eye-view of the surrounding lakes. There is an even higher observation tower Näsinneula. But I couldn’t brave it. I’m generally not very good with heights…

GETTING TO KNOW THE GROUNDS…

I spent the first week of November exploring the grounds of my Haihara Art Center cottage. I walked around lake Kaukajärvi, and hiked up Hikivuori (translating to “Sweat Mountain,” but it wasn’t really a mountain. It’s more of a cliff...). I drew in my sketchbook, took pictures, and followed small footpaths until it felt familiar. The beginning of November in Finland brings along with it many dark days and nights, but I was still able to find moments of inspiration. Sometimes it was in views close-up and other times far away. I really loved watching the lines of trees out my windows that would sometimes be so covered in mist that you could hardly see them. Other days you could see them so crisp and clear. The woods had incredible textures - plants, moss, and some tree trunks even had faces. The drawings I made from observations played a growing role in my residency sketchbook. It had been an eternity since I last lived a stone’s throw away from a forest. The last year and a half I’ve worked and lived on the sixth floor of a building in central Helsinki. The closest woods aren’t far away but I can’t see them out my window. I felt that it was important for me to make the most out of this opportunity. However, as November moved along the days were growing darker. The time I had to spend outside with light was diminishing. So I’d be up and outside at sunrise, and then around four o’clock I would tuck in and pour over Tove’s collection of Moomin books and work in my sketchbook.

THE MOOMIN MUSEUM: ‘Imaginary Worlds and the Sketchbook’ Workshop

On the first Saturday of November, my workshop at the Moomin Museum set off to a roaring start. We had planned to have a non-stop workshop at the Atelier called ‘Imaginary Worlds and the Sketchbook.’ In this workshop, I would create an imaginary world on the wall of the Atelier together with the museum guests over the course of the month. Our objective was to show how easy and fun it is to create a new world, and to see what would happen if we ask the museum guests to paint or draw one element that they could add into the world. I also wanted to provide a colorful place to escape the dark and dreary days we were living in! I had planned a few starting elements for the world: an undulating sea, a mountainous range, stormy woods, and rolling hills. I kept the elements minimal, as to not influence the guests’ creations too much in the very beginning. I planned the starting elements at the residency cottage, where the paper base barely fit into the enormous living room! I felt like Jackson Pollock, whipping around a paint brush filled with ink to create the beginning imaginary world.

Lo and behold the workshop wasn’t a bust but a smashing success! The guests enjoyed coming in and contributing to the world even when it was just a few black lines on an open white canvas. They imagined their own characters, modes of transport, houses, and plants. I was floored by everyone’s creativity! Every Tuesday and Saturday we had lots of new contributions to the wall. The world started building faster than I had anticipated, so I started coloring like the wind to keep up with the guests. I painted the world with bright and colorful gouache paints (using the same materials available at the workshop). It was a blast incorporating guests’ drawings into the world and listening to the stories behind their ideas. Soon enough the world took on a life of its’ own. A monster island appeared, a misfit Groke club, a vast meadow of flowers, a snowy Christmas town, and even a gaping black hole! Each workshop day I started coming in earlier and earlier, to spend more time painting, arranging and gluing the newest additions to the world. I’m so proud of what we created together with the help of so many people including the wonderful museum staff, and I can still navigate around the world without looking at it!

THE RESIDENCY PROJECT: from tropical back to boreal

Another part of the residency was to create my own project that would reflect my experience at the museum. I decided to fill up a sketchbook and maintain the theme of ‘imaginary worlds.’ So, I set off to develop a whole new wonderland within the pages of my sketchbook! I was angling to be inspired by Jansson’s Moomin Valley, and create something that would pay homage to her legacy. Through the project, I was able to deepen my understanding of Tove’s ink drawings, books, and even her own sources of inspiration. The Moomin Museum happened to have a temporary exhibit at the Observatory called “Tove’s Bookshelf,” which included highlights from her collection of art and literature books. The exhibit shed light on the types of illustrators and writers that were close to Tove’s heart, and I found it so surprising and illuminating! Tove liked artists such as Beatrix Potter, John Bauers, Hans Christian Andersen and J.R.R. Tolkien. The exhibit also helped me feel much more immersed in the residency, and sometimes I did feel like I was carefully tracing her steps. The imaginary world in my sketchbook began with a little spark of escapism, specifically from the cold and the dark winter. The Moomin books were also rather tropical. But the grounds at the Haihara Art Center had a hold on me, and quickly my imaginary world started to build around it instead. I could see my little red cabin from the top of Sweat Mountain, and it looked just like something out of Tove’s paintings! So my imaginary world became just as grey and wintry as the world I was already living in. But it was a dark world with pops of magic, hope and playfulness. Where even in the dead of night there was something small but mighty that could light up the woods.

SPENDING TIME AWAY FROM HOME: the homesick edition

A month can sometimes feel like a week when you’re at home. I often feel like I can’t get very much done in the course of just one month, but in Tampere I felt like I had a lot of time to actually get a lot of work done. In a way it felt short, I certainly didn’t have a shortage of inspiration. On the flip side, it did feel like a long time to be away from my two cats who were waiting for me in Helsinki. I had grown accustomed to their rattlings about while I work away at my desk. I missed our routines: morning scratches, meal times, playing around, treat times, and evening snuggles on the couch. Since I was seven years old, I haven’t gone much longer than a month living without animals. So I missed them a lot. My longing for them made me look for those signs of life elsewhere. As it turns out, they weren’t so hard to find. The yard was filled with crows, pigeons, robins, mice, and rabbits. I had been blind to it during the first week, but by the second week it felt like there was a 24-hour circus around me. Observing these little creatures lit a spark, and soon they were popping up all over my sketchbook. But these creatures weren’t rabbits or mice or birds. They were imaginary. Splotches of left-over, watered down gouache with eyes and feet and tiny noses. With shifty eyes. Running and scratching and rustling. The window at my desk looked out on to a vegetable garden that stretched past the red fence that outlined my yard. The garden was overgrown, with little furry bushes and white tarps held up by sticks that protected the plants from the cold. But to me they looked like homes to the shadow creatures in my sketchbook.

WINTER IN TAMPERE: wrapping things up

As November was coming to a close, Tampere was covered in a blanket of snow. It was incredible to see my cottage and the Haihara Art Center in two seasons: first in the gray and misty fall, and then in classic snowy winter that came just in time for the holidays. The change of season also happened in my sketchbook. In the beginning the paintings were gray and grim with pops of color, that slowly turned into wintry pastel colors. In Haihara, my imagination ran wild in ways that were both exhilarating and terrifying. I could see my creatures running around in the woods I was in, but I could also see them lurking around the dark corners of the cottage in the middle of the night. Or swinging in the dark, looming trees. The creatures had a mind of their own, they were wild beasts, and they hadn’t decided yet if they were on my side or fighting against it. I just made sure I created a world they might fit into and would want to stay. I imagined the world in all different types of seasons and weather. I wanted the colors to be rich and exciting even on the dreariest days.

All in all, being the artist-in-residence at the Moomin Museum was incredible. I wish every artist out there gets to partake in these types of residencies. It re-opens you to learn something new and to embrace the uncertainty. I’m so lucky to have been able to experience so many of these types of traveling experiences. It can feel scary to travel to a new place and set up camp, and I had plenty of days where I missed my desk and wanted to be in the comfort of my home. But I am so glad that I took the risk and applied myself because now I have all these memories, drawings, and photos to remember it forever!

I particularly enjoyed connecting with the museum guests and creating something awesome together just as much as I loved stowing away into my cottage home and creating my own little wonderland. Seriously, could not choose which imaginary world I would rather live in! Both worlds contain elements of a utopia, but also great dangers lurk around the corners… I took everything I could out of the opportunity to deep dive into Tove Jansson’s work, which was incredibly important to me as a Finnish-American illustrator. Before this, I’ve had many chances to study American illustration history including a short residency at the N.C. Wyeth studio through the Brandywine Museum as well as working at The Illustrated Gallery for years. I never dreamed I would get to do the same with Finnish illustration history. That’s a cool thing to cross off my bucket list! On the last page of my sketchbook, I wanted to pay homage to Tove by making a self portrait with my characters just like she had done with her Moomin family.

I’d like to thank the Moomin Museum and their staff as well as the Finnish Illustrators Association for allowing me to take part in this unique budding tradition!