PLOT – Heli Penttinen

“Nothing is important, except gardening—and even that is not so important.”

Painting and gardening have much in common. No matter how carefully you set boundaries, monitor, protect, and plan, at some point both a painting and a garden begin to take on a life of their own, and everything turns into improvisation. The painting starts guiding itself, and the original plan must be abandoned. Around the garden, nature is always lurking, ready to reclaim the cultivated plots and carefully tended land.

A painting is its own place, a state of mind, a reality where one can create their own rules and boundaries within which to operate. A vegetable patch—a plot—is a similar attempt to control and organize a small slice of something vast, wild, and free.

The world of edible plants offers an abundance of visually intriguing subjects. In my still-life paintings, I capture from memory the essence, colors, scents, sprawling growth patterns, or sheer vitality of plants. I observe and care for them in the garden, but the paintings take shape later, in the studio. The starting point for a painting can be a wilted head of lettuce, a cutting board stained by beet juice, or the tartness of redcurrant juice. In the end, the subject itself doesn’t really matter—what matters most is the color, the spreading of paint, the act of painting itself.

Translated with ChatGPT