A few days ago when browsing through language hat I found coloria. It’s a unique site (in Finnish) all about colours: history, cultural meanings, chemistry, pigments and so forth, plus a discussion forum, by Finnish artist Päivi Hintsanen. She says (in the comments at languagehat), “the site really is my hobby, an escape place when ever my real work starts to bug me. I’m a freelancer web (graphic) designer but I’ve always been attracted to colours.[…] I’ve collected colour related material from everywhere (about 20 years), so the information has been collected bit by bit from several sources.”

Naturally Päivi has several sites including art pages and a blog in English net:design:station and Cholegh her Finnish blog.

At Cholegh I spotted an ikon/link for the Jyväskylä Artists’ Association blog project. (Jyväskylä is a lovely, very culturally lively small city in central Finland that we visited when travelling in Finland in year 2000.) As part of their 60th anniversary this year, this art association is having interested artists write blogs about their work and life as artists. Päivi made a basic layout and showed them how it works. Cholegh became the first one in the project.

Several artists have since started their blogs, with more coming, including a printmaker, Kirsi Neuvonen, whose work I’ve admired since seeing it at the association’s Galleria Becker on that visit in 2000. Though her blog is in Finnish, she also has a website of her works with English, well worth visiting.

I also enjoy Kapa or Martti Kapanen’s gentle humour at kapasia and some examples of his photographic work posted at leuku.

I’ll be eagerly checking these blogs out as they emerge, and there may be quite a few that join in from the membership of almost 100 artists, and though they may all be in Finnish, some will likely have websites of their work with some English.

I’ve truly enjoyed an email exchange with enthusiastic and lively Päivi, who’s already mentioned our new connection on her blog (kiitos!). I’m excited to have at last found, quite by accident, some Finnish artists with blogs. I’m getting some needed practice reading and writing Finnish, and discovering once again how blogs are making the world smaller.