Known as the ‘Picasso of the North,’ Reidar Särestöniemi is regarded as one of the greatest Finnish-Lappish artists and as the most remarkable Lappish artist of his time. He was born the seventh and youngest child in the family of Alma and Matti Kaukonen at the Särestöniemi farm near Kaukonen village, Kittilä. The self-sufficient farming family, who had given the village its name in the 17th century, later changed their name to that of the farm.
Särestöniemi studied first at the Finnish Art Society's Drawing School in Helsinki (1947-1951), then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (1951-1952), and finally at the Ilya Repin Institute in Leningrad (1956-1959). His public career began in 1959 with his first solo exhibition in Helsinki after returning from Leningrad. His paintings and graphic works increased in size over the years, so by the seventies he was producing large and colourful oil paintings. In 1975, he was awarded the title Professor of Arts by the President of Finland as an appreciation of his life's work.
Reidar Särestöniemi was a colourful character who in his time prompted plenty of discussion of his art and personality. He was gay in a country where homosexuality was illegal until 1971 and still classified as a disease until 1981. Reidar Särestöniemi painted his inner feelings on canvas and in his art, love is depicted in many ways and symbols, being something forbidden and controversial.
Apart from his years of study, Reidar Särestöniemi spent all his life at the family farm where he was born, some 100km north of the Artic Circle, working in two studios he built there. The natural world surrounding him in Lapland and local people with their beliefs and stories affected Reidar deeply and gave his art its content and strength. Peatlands and fells, willow grouse, lynx, rams and reindeer are frequent motifs in his works.
The Lappish countryside provided Särestöniemi not only with motifs, but perhaps with the most notable element of his art, its strong colours with which he kept exploring throughout his career. This was not always unproblematic, as such use of colour as Särestöniemi's was unusual in Finnish art in the 1960s and 1970s and often led to intense criticism.
Although Lapland was a major inspiration for Särestöniemi, his art has been seen as influenced from other directions, such as by the great names of European modernism, by Russian art, and prehistoric cave paintings, to name a few. The Lappish influence strengthened in Särestöniemi's art as time went on, so that his works from the 1950s differ from his most well-known works, the large and colourful oil paintings from the 1960s and 70s.
The 1977 Nordic Art medal for Norway is the only medal known to have been created by Reidar. His mother was born in Northern Norway, so that may have influenced his choice of country. A man who wore an impressive beard himself, he liked bearded and moustached men and even wrote poems to the "Grey bearded man of Russia". The face on the medal obverse could be a self-portrait or a portrayal of an iconic figure. Sometimes he painted moustached animals, like lynxes and seals. Often an animal figure symbolises the person of the artist himself, so it is possible the fish on the medal symbolises something about Reidar, although exactly what that might be remains a mystery. Perhaps, in the end, he preferred it that way.
His main studio was destroyed by fire in 1977 along with all the works in it. However, his gallery and those works were saved, and it was here that the Särestöniemi Museum was established in 1985 to exhibit his work in its original surroundings. In 2015, in honour of Särestöniemi's 90th birthday and of the museum's 30th anniversary, sculptor Sonja Vectomov unveiled a statue of Särestöniemi at the museum.
Contributed by Chrystopher J Spicer, with valuable assistance from Heli Tuhkanen at the Särestöniemi Museum.