This building used to be a dairy, where the sloping floors are explained by the need for daily cleaning and hygiene.

And this is your room -cool, shabby, appropriately shaped and simple, but above all it is 'a room of your own' in the Virginia Woolfian sense.

This whole idea of being still and naked under someone else’s gaze is strange and alien to life.

I don’t know if any other culture has taken model sitting as far as the European tradition?

The stillness involuntarily becomes a Zen-like experience of merging with the world.

Today, my job is to lie on a thin mattress.

If my position is good, I slip into oblivion like a piece of clothing on the floor.

This position that I'm currently in, strikes me as somehow familiar from art history -of images merged into one another in my memory. It reminds me of the pictures of the nude Venuses and other Gods, allegories turned into pleasures by artists still revered today.

Should I be like Titian's Venus, looking straight at the viewer, or close my eyes like in Giorgione's painting?

Should I lay on a pillow and stick out my bottom, like Francois Boucher made of his female models do? We could rewrite art history from the start or conduct an anachronistic experiment.

I have it easy, all I do is look at your facial expressions and your strokes lasting a few seconds at a time.

Loading the colour, strokes of the brush, seeing your gaze brush by me, then fixing on the painting, a step back, then another. Returning to the palette The same series of the movements are repeated with thousands of small variations.

Everything that is in the painting has been put there.

You have to divide your time between observing and building your interpretation, so in fact, I have more time to observe you than you me.

You have on a thick stained shirt, swishing shell suit pants with dozens of paint stains. Your shoes are worn-out but confortable.

You turn your head and stretch your neck from side to side, roll your shoulders. You blend a color, load your brush with it and take it to the canvas. I can hear the coarse bristles sliding against the canvas and short, low tapping studs. The soft aroma of oil

When you sometimes drift away in your chair, you yourself remind me of a model in your stained clothes, in position where expressions stop, and gravity takes hold of all of our softness.

We should ponder more on incompleteness – its attraction and significance, and not always be content in saying that perfection is boring, or that incompleteness leaves room for interpretation and imagination.

Incompleteness is in relation to what we know can still be done, but what has not yet been done or, for one reason or another, we don’t want to be done.

Can incompleteness be about a reverse attraction to ruins? The feelings when time has made its mark on buildings or paintings?

With incompleteness, there is still time, we haven’t even started the clock yet. That’s when the artwork hasn’t yet started to decay.

Even though an incomplete work isn’t protected from the eroding force of time forever, at least it’s an attempt to postpone this upcoming inevitability.

From the artist’s point of view, incompleteness is an attempt topostpone the moment when they have already said it all, and there is nothing more to be said.

Texts Sampsa Virkajärvi
Photos Riikka Lenkkeri