Light paintings by Janne Parviainen

Janne Parviainen has created a personal painting technique that reflects the urban and technology centered life of today. His most common subjects are city environments and nature landscapes.

Parviainen paints on old, used windows with his mixed-technique that involves oil color, metal leaves and permanent markers. Working on both sides of the glass, he produces a very strong feeling of depth and space into his paintings. As a historical element, the old window panes create a story of their own; life has been observed through the windows countless times before in their previous use. The metal leaves presenting the sky with their luminosity and reflections emphasize the paintings' technology-influenced appearence and so on distract it from the traditional nature portraits.

In the paintings of Janne Parviainen the urban landscapes - built by human hands and forgotten by the public eye - represent the city and it's emotional concept. For today's urban people, Finnish national landscape no longer is a top-of-the-hill view opening to a summery lake, but a constructed urban view, a place where you can associate with your history, actions and memories. The view of the painting reaches the city structures from a distance, like a snapshot through a window. The viewer of the painting can only anticipate the presence of people, they are not visible.

Light painting photography is an art form in which photos are manipulated manually using different kind of light sources during long exposure times. The idea of the art form is not to use any post production to the photo at all, all photos should be straight from the camera. While the camera is exposing the area of the photo can be used as a canvas by moving different lights in it, as if drawing or painting to it. The exposure times used in light painting vary from a few seconds to hours, depending on the desired effect. The actual light painting can be done with colored strobes, flash lights, light toys or tools especially engineered for light painting.

"What interests me most in light painting is the ability to draw in three dimensional space and the possibility to alter the reality without post processing programs. I like to use in my photos different kind of figures such as skeletons and ghostly light creatures. By using these figures I can add more humane stories into my photos and alter the cultural learned feelings they cause in the viewer of the photo. I especially like to use the skeleton figure because of it's strong pre-learned emotional concept and place it in totally different situations and emotional stages than in which it's usually seen in popular culture. "