REIDAR SÄRESTÖNIEMI. Early autumn, haystacks, signed with dedication and dated -48, oil on panel.

50 x 60 cm, 77 x 88 cm.
Reidar Särestöniemi was one of Finland's most distinctive modern artists. During his early years, he developed a visual language that already bore traces of what would later become his signature style: intense colors, a strong mysticism of nature, and a personal interpretation of life in Lapland.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, Särestöniemi studied at the School of Arts, Crafts and Design and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and in Leningrad. His early works clearly show the influence of Russian icon and folk art, which he encountered during his studies in Leningrad. The motifs are often based on everyday life in Lapland, self-portraits and portraits of relatives, animals and traditional landscapes. Everyday scenes from Lapland's nature – forests, snowy landscapes, reindeer, village life and depictions of work and life in the north, rooted in his own experiences from the farm in Kittilä. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had begun to take on larger canvas formats, stronger colors, especially bright blue, red, and orange, and a more mythical and expressive tone.
Särestöniemi is less known for his nude studies than for his colorful landscapes, but figure painting played an important role in his artistic foundation. During his studies at both the School of Arts, Crafts and Design in Helsinki and later at the Academy of Fine Arts, as well as during his time in Leningrad, Särestöniemi worked intensively with classical figure drawing. His time in Leningrad in particular gave him a foundation in the Russian academic school's demands for precision, volume, and physicality. It is here that we find his most purely traditional nude studies, which show a clear mastery of proportions and modeling of the body's light.
Särestöniemi painted a significant number of portraits, especially in his early and middle periods. In his family portraits, he often returned to his brothers, mother, and other relatives. Typical features of the portraits were compact and intimate compositions, a certain weight in the expression—the portraits often convey a sense of stillness, seriousness, or melancholy—and darker color scales that still bear traces of academic training.
The landscape paintings from the 1960s are characterized by powerful colors and a unique interpretation of Lapland landscapes. During this decade, he developed his characteristic visual language, in which nature is not only reproduced realistically but also charged with emotional and symbolic dimensions. Mountains, forests, islands, and the northern lights are often transformed into vibrant fields of color where the energy of nature is visible to the viewer. His painting combines modernist influences with a deeply personal relationship to northern nature, and is still considered among the most significant of his work.