Cthulhu and other ancient original art (image heavy)

I did a post featuring some of my selfportraits from over the years. This time i'm going to show some works from my first year of painting at the Orivesi college.
There is some pretty inspired and intense work, though i was still grasping for technique.

My first "crush" is kinda split between the xenomorph monster and Sigourney Weaver in Alien. I used to watch the movie alone as a kid from VHS while everyone else was sleeping. That or pink panther cartoons, now that was some scary stuff. These are few of the very first paintings i made.

alien, oil on fiberboard, 2006

alien II, oil on fiberboard, 2006
Also i did this little sculpture out of modeling clay.

Somewhere along the year we had a printmaking course. There are little too many technical phases for me, but i might give it a try again.

lizard, etching, 2006

Our main teacher came up with a lot of good excersises. One of them was a basic Rorschach style ink blob test. We spilled ink on a piece of paper folded in two and then painted what we saw in there. So welcome to my mind:

beast, oil on fiberboard, 2006

Picking up on that.. Monsters were ok, but I was trying to come up with something with little more depth or story behind it.. Think the task was to make a two panel painting. I went to even darker places there.

Mother, oil on fiberboard, 2006
Sleep paralysis was something i had been suffering for few years every now and then. There are some famous paintings about it and i wanted to put my own experience on canvas.

sleep paralysis, oil on fiberboard, 2006

So sometimes you need to do something a little lighter and colorful. Maybe not less disturbing.

5, oil on fiberboard, 2006

I used deviantart back then to upload my pictures and there was a club called Dark Arts Asylum. I designed my room there which would show a lot of the things that were influencing me that time.

room 217, oil on fiberboard, 2006

This was a comission I promised to make for a couple of friends against some pints of beer. They just wanted something colorful. I don't know if i hit the mark actually.

unnamed, oil on canvas, 2007

After the first half of the college, there was an opportunity to move out of the shared studio to a single one
in a separate building and i jumped on it. Now you would not have the teacher there with you all day, but you had quite a lot of room for yourself.

part of the singe studio place with some unfinished paintings

One of the larger works i did. It's about 3/5 of a fiberboard panel, wood frame is nailed on the backside to support it. These thing would be a pain in the ass later as you would transport and store them.
Lady C, oil on fiberboard,2007

Beside other practice we had weekly live drawing and painting classes

live studies with oil and watercolor

I felt my work wasn't quite up there yet, i kept pushing trying to develop something and mature my ideas.
Here i had a bicycle wheel that i would use as reference. I had started to have some eye problems and i guess i was sort of in denial of it back then, but as i look back at these pieces i see that i was working on it. The wheel parts had a complexity that was quite difficult to understand by looking at it all at once. The pattern on the tire, the cogs and spokes. so i took it as challenge and repeated it over and over, hoping it would produce something interesting.

These are few of the works i ended up using in my artschool application and got selected to entrance exams.
I ended up calling the series "Violence and feeling of strength" this is where my brushes began to take serious damage during the course of painting.

from series Väkivaltaa ja voimantuntoa/violence and feel of strength, oil on fiberboard, 2007

from series Väkivaltaa ja voimantuntoa/violence and feel of strength, oil on fiberboard, 2007

Last but not least evil, The Great Cthulhu.

Cthulhu, oil on canvas, 2006

Mikko Lyytinen
Visual Artist

follow me @mikkolyytinen