WOULD YOU FEEL SOMETHING? – Minna Linja

Minna Linja is a painter born in Sodankylä (1978). Linja lives and works in Vihti. She graduated from the University of Lapland with a Master of Arts degree in 2017.

Linja paints large, colorful abstract paintings on canvas using acrylic and oil paints. The painting process begins with the need to process deep-seated emotions. For her, the color red represents energy and willpower, and it has a strong positive charge. Linja paints out of gratitude, love, presence, and the fragility of life.

For her, painting is thinking, freedom, and a thirst for life. With colors, she wants to celebrate this very moment, the only one that exists right now. Life is fragile. Life is now. Painting is also about leaving traces, making marks of the time we live in. The works do not emerge in a vacuum; they are always part of some context. Years from now, they will tell their own story of this moment.

The Would You Feel Something? exhibition features paintings created over the past year. For Linja, painting is a holistic process, but above all, painting is gratitude. A painting that often begins from sorrow or pain grows through the process into a sign of everything that is well right now. Although the black wandering layers in the painting may eventually be almost completely covered, they exist and have meaning. With her Would You Feel Something? exhibition, Linja wants to offer the viewer an opportunity to pause and examine the emerging feelings, thoughts, and questions as they come. Especially in these challenging times, when the future is a big question mark for each of us, she hopes the paintings also convey strength.

IF YOU WOULD STOP If you would stop, would you feel something?
If you put down everything you should do.
Would the strength flow from you, or to you?
Would you have time to notice what happens?

If you would accept,
if you would stop running,
would you wonder when a person is enough?

If you would stop,
open your skin, your mind, everything.
Would you find something,
would you feel something,
would you remember something?

Something precious,
good,
something that touches.
Which would only require you to stop.

(Minna Linja 2018)

Translated with Copilot