Saara Vainio

Saara Vainio is a visual artist and art teacher from Hamina, Finland. She creates large-scale, realistic watercolours that inhabit the boundary between the everyday and the fantastical.

Vainio’s works represent the most traditional legacy of mimetic watercolour painting, in which each painting is built up slowly, layer by layer, over a meticulously executed preliminary drawing. Her surrealist paintings always combine at least two elements: a girl representing the human figure and a fragment of nature. The exhibition conveys the message that contemporary art can also have a classical appearance and engage viewers through traditional working methods.

“I am a visual artist, and watercolour is my medium. The defining features of my work include subjects situated on the threshold of the unreal, a scale and structure unusual for watercolour painting, the prominent role of the matte paper surface, and a highly finished, realistic visual language. My paintings are large and are neither framed nor enclosed behind reflective glass. The ability to view them directly, without a layer of glass—and even to experience the possibility of direct contact—is important to me in terms of the medium. The UV protection essential for watercolours is provided by a protective varnish.

Over the years, the themes of my work have emerged from a visual exploration of various boundaries and intersections: those between fairy tale and reality, realism and surrealism, as well as conceptual pairs such as surface and depth. I have explored the idea of mimesis and sketch-like expression existing simultaneously, and experimented with the presence of refined, timeless realism in contemporary watercolour painting. In addressing these themes, my practice has developed along three concurrent strands, or series of works, all of which continue to expand with new pieces.

My aim is to create opportunities for individual insights in the experience of painting and to enable viewers to perceive the multiple layers of art through my work. As an artist, I want to bring the invisible into view, raise questions about the nature of unreality and, in my own subtle way, suggest that perhaps not everything is contained within this visible, material reality.”