50 years old | Painter Vilmalotta Olivia Schafhauser tells stories in her works that she hopes people will identify with.

“I AM really happy to have seen different cultures, live in different countries and meet people from side to side. I had a tremendously rich childhood. My parents let my three brothers and me live, experience and try, ”the painter Vilmalotta Olivia Schafhauser says.

The family sailed the world’s seas on their own ship and lived in Hawaii and Tonga, among other places. As a painter, the daughter announced that at the age of four, she would paint a large barrel in the cottage with a big brush in red. The oil painting work that survived the following year already had strong colors and truncated human figures.

Schafhauser studied sign language as an interpreter and teacher and also planned a career as a midwife or doctor before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2002.

Parents, a children’s cultural expert known as the Arja aunt of television Arja Virtasen and editor-in-chief and newspaper publisher Jorma K. Virtasen, it was agreed that the parents would not yet appear at his opening so that he could create his own career.

SCHAFHAUSERIN the work is based on a great interest in people. He enjoys watching passers-by and watching their expressions and moods.

“Life is made up of pieces. I wonder what kind of moments people just live in and whether those moments are coincidences or whether they lead to something meaningful, ”he describes.

He paints his impressions into puzzle-like stories, the structure of which has borrowed from the sign language a stage where events can be read equally from different directions. The stories thus remain contradictory and open to a wide variety of interpretations, a stream of connections.

“I traditionally paint on linen. I do not plan work in advance. I make ten boards at a time, walking from one to another. This creates a series of paintings that are completely personal in nature, even though they may have the same elements. The works only get their name when they are ready, ”says Schafhauser.

“Writing poems and aphorisms goes hand in hand with painting. After painting for a few months, there comes a break, and that’s when the writings start to emerge, so that I sometimes get up at night to write. I will see later that those texts have said something about the pictorial episode that followed. ”

As his most amazing international performance, Schafhauser remembers a solo exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, which he was invited to hold as the first Finnish visual artist in 2006.

From Manila, the Philippines, he has remembered, in particular, the transport of paintings in an old rickshaw ride on bumpy streets.

SIGNAL LANGUAGE During his course in Vienna in 1995, Vilmalotta Virtanen met a German photographer Robert Schafhauserin. They traveled through the city at night, coincidentally to the same places as Richard Linklaterin completed in the same year Love before morning movie is ranked. The couple got married, lived in different countries and now got an adult Indigo-boy.

“Before the birth of Indigo, I didn’t get out of the blue. We were then living in Munich, Germany, where blue and white were visible everywhere. As the boy was born, other colors began to fade, and I became a red lioness. After the divorce, I started painting gray again, ”says Schafhauser.

He has lived with his son in Finland, Spain and various Asian countries in recent years. In the Philippines, in addition to painting, he worked as an aid worker.

“It was amazing to see in Asia how grateful and generous people were, even though they had nothing. There, spirituality and spirituality, which are important to me, were strongly present. People had each other, and they cared about each other, ”he recalls.

The artist Schafhauser began the 20th anniversary of his career a little early by holding an exhibition at the Art Center in Salmela last summer. He had a retrospective exhibition at the Taarast Art Center in September.

In April, she is expected to have an exhibition at the Art Cube Gallery in Manila and in the autumn at Galleria Pirkko-Liisa Topelius in Helsinki.

“I believe and hope that at some point I will be able to head to the world again. I would like to both paint and work in relief work. And if you still find that love one day, but you see it then, ”Schafhauser says.

He plans to celebrate his birthdays with his brothers in the spring and hold bigger parties in the summer.

“Hopefully the pandemic will give up. I am already looking forward to that togetherness, good food, in-depth conversations, laughter, madness and warm moments. ”