Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Bahrain is enjoying its first splattering of snow this month thanks to Aila Asu who has captured the essence of a white winter covering her Finnish homeland with some stunning paintings.
The Bahrain-based artist is staging her first exhibition in the kingdom at the World Beat Fitness Centre in Janabiya.
“I have been painting my whole life,” mother-of-two Aila said, “but my technique and my style have changed over the years.
“Earlier I painted very detailed images with oil, but now I paint more abstract paintings and I use acrylic colours. I changed to acrylic because I am a bit too impatient when it comes to using oil, which take days to dry. With acrylic colours you are able to continue painting and even finish the whole painting in one day, if you wish to.
“I dream about art, sometimes when I wake up, I have a ready idea in my head, or sometimes when I run or go riding on my motorcycle, the ideas start to pop into my mind.”
Aila is married to air traffic controller Antti and they have two sons, Lauri, seven, and Joel, six. The family live in Saar.
Their children enjoy painting too. Aila said: “Often, when they see me painting they join me and I encourage them to make their own creations … and not to mess with mine!
“I get my inspiration mostly from nature, but I am also a photographer and often it is light, or lights and shadows that inspire me.
“If the light is right, anything can be photogenic or beautiful and worth capturing. It is exactly the same thing with painting. The light in Bahrain is very good for painting, especially during the short winter months.”
Her exhibition is called ‘The first snow’. She explained: “For anybody who has experienced it, who has seen the first snow of the autumn to fall, knows the feeling, how it is so real and somehow so definitive. It is a day which many remember, when you say goodbye to the summer.
“In Finland I have always been attracted to the huge differences between seasons. In the summer time it can be +35C but in winter time the temperature can fall as low as -40C.
“Springs are light green, summers dark green, autumns orange and red and brown and winters white. The same landscape looks completely different if you take a photo in summer and winter.
“In art I have plenty of inspirers, from Monet to Picasso and so on, but my biggest idol so far has been a Finnish artist called Reidar Särestöniemi (1925- 1981).
“I love the colours and the wildness in his paintings. He was breaking many rules; he was different and very artistic. For example, when he was painting rams, he could wear a ram fur for months and go everywhere wearing it.
“I am also inspired by music, and often when I listen to certain sorts of music I can also see the difference it makes in my painting, the type of the music affects the colours, the strokes – everything.
“While I was studying I used to earn some pocket money by drawing portraits, and I still keep up the skill, as drawing is hassle free, you can do it anywhere, it requires only pencil and paper, or an iPad these days!
I was painting with autumn colours but we got visitors from Finland, and they started to say how cold it was in Finland at the moment, and how much it was snowing when they left Helsinki, and suddenly I realised that it had started to snow in my paintings as well.
“By the way, one day I was searching on the internet and ended up on the pages of Italian artist Giulia Filippi where he had collected all the names for snow we have in the Finnish language.
“I knew there were many; after all, snow is a big thing in Finland. But I was not prepared to find out that we have 480 words to describe the different kinds of snow we receive!”
No wonder Santa was so sleighed by the place that he decided to set up home there.
The people of Bahrain can also sample a taste of the snowy experience until the end of the month at the exhibition. Some of the images are not for sale but others displayed are being snapped up by art collectors priced between BD30 to BD160.
