“At their deepest level my paintings and drawings are about oneness and wholeness,” writes Helena Tiainen, who lives and works in Berkeley, California, as a self-employed artist. “They are about the seeming separateness of physical forms and the delicate dance of unity that underlies these seemingly separate structures. I could say that my art is about the interconnectedness of all life. I choose to paint and draw mainly figurative abstractions since these naturally have a lot of suggestive forms that get associated in the viewer’s eye and mind to create a greater whole. Besides my own motives to create it is my intention to mirror back to the viewer the contents of their own mind as reflected thru my paintings and drawings.”

To learn more, read Phil Barcio’s blog post and explore Tianen’s website.

About Helena

(see her website for the full bio, from which this text was drawn)

Helena was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland, and arrived in the United States in August 1979 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. In December 1982 she graduated from the SFAI with a BFA major in painting and drawing and minor in printmaking. Besides fine arts she also does freelance illustration, graphic design, interior design and professional organizing. Recently Helena has also started writing poetry again.

Helena often paints and draws what are usually considered beautiful and delicate sides of life. But the forms in her paintings and drawings are also often metaphors and represent ways that she as a human being relates to the world and the cosmos at large. Helena chooses forms and colors that hold meaning and feeling to her and she paints and draws that which has an impact on her. She likes to delve deep into the spirit of her subject matter as she consciously and subconsciously perceives it. Helena trusts her feelings and ideas/cues that come to her while painting and drawing and follows them in making choices on the canvas and paper. Often these choices are so fast that there is no real analytic thinking process involved. In order to see what needs to be changed she needs to step back and take a good look at the whole picture. The process of painting and drawing has taught Helena much about the process of life itself. Helena enjoys the dialogue she has with her art.