About me

Ville Olkkonen
Born 1973

I am an artist, entrepreneur and a father of two, living and working in Porvoo, Finland.

I’ve been working with different forms of art for over 30 years. Music and photography have been the vessels of expression to me for a long time. But it was in 2018 that I took up painting more seriously. And it’s been my passion ever since.

I’ve got my degree on producing art and I’m a bachelor of media. My main profession is web design, I create surfaces to the web. Photography and web design follow the same principles. How do people understand content within given frames: composition, white space, the colours, the form of the message. What do we see consciously and sub-consciously. All these things can be found in visual arts. In paintings.

Abstract art as an artform struck me as a lighting some fifteen years ago, as I got familiar with abstract expressionism that emerged during the 40’s and 50’s. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and their contemporaries created new rules. Abstract art had surely existed before that as an acknowledged form of art, but now there was something new being born. Something that revolutionized people’s conceptions on what an image can be and what a presented visual content can be. The power of image rose to new dimensions. And it enticed me decades later.

Even though my own work is strongly abstract, it has it’s contact surface to the real world. It is born of emotion and concepts. The parts of the human brain that produce linguistic communication, that operates with language we speak, resides in a different part of the brain than the one that processes emotions. It is difficult to bring emotions to exact words (if words even exist to convey certain emotions). It is as difficult to make images of emotions. What does a luminous, powerful joy look like? How to illustrate a concept of time changing a certain object?

A collection of my work The Vibrant, Worn // Orphans studies these emotions and concepts. It brings 16 surfaces to be seen and to be experienced. The exhibition is held in Culture House Grand, Porvoo during 4.4.-28.4.2023.