Kalervo Palsa

Life

Among his local contemporaries of Kittilä in Lapland he had the reputation of a drunken artist masturbating at home and painting furiously. He is said to have felt haunted both by his perverse urges and the provincial and narrow-minded mental perimeter of his northern hometown.

While he lived there, his abode was a tiny studio cabin which was closer to a shack than a house. He wired it for electricity by drawing a long extension cable from a nearby house. He called it his "Getsemane" after the biblical site, or sometimes his "castle in the clouds".

Upon his death two rumours spread in the local community. One that he had in a drunken stupor collapsed into a snowbank, and died from exposure. The other that he had hanged himself. The latter was more understandable, since several of his self-portraits featured a hangman's noose around his neck, and several other of his paintings also used the symbology of hanging.

The real circumstances of his death – lying in bed with pneumonia, without anyone checking to see how he was doing – were perhaps, and regrettably more fitting to an artist, but not to the figure they knew.

During his life he had many artist friends such as Reidar Särestöniemi, but only two real supporters; his mother, and a soul-mate/muse he found in Maj-Lis Pitkänen, a psychiatrist specialising in troubled children who shared his morbid view of the world.

Maj-Lis was actually the sister of Kalervo Palsa's childhood sweetheart Maaret for whom he maintained a long-lasting unrequited torch of love, quite openly writing about it in his letters to her and her sister and eventually sisters husband.

After his death Maj-Lis fought a protracted and bitter battle to raise an appropriate cenotaph for "Kalle". The monument shaped like a stylized seed or bullroarer was viewed by the parish as being pagan, or even representing female sexual organs. Many voices proclaimed that it was a mistake to let the "pervert" be buried into holy ground to begin with.

Over time, the notables from Kittilä, who once strenuously opposed the monument, have instead begun to express pride that an internationally renowned artist was a local boy.

The art of Kalervo Palsa

Kalervo Palsa used an incredibly varied palette of techniques and materials even including housepaint. The subjects with the richest content, generally received the most hurried and crude treatment. The over 1000 self-portraits on the other hand generally were treated at the very least with competent technique.

Mostly the works explore in graphic detail the dark side of humanity in general and his native northern regions specifically. Grotesque sexuality, sadism, homosexuality, bisexuality and a general emotional frigidity paraphilia reflect his own inner turmoil and were perhaps a reaction to the mental atmosphere of his hometown.

Palsa did have a brief fling with abstract art while staying in New York City, but as he recounts in his diary, that phase came to an abrupt halt when one day he saw a passed out black man sprawled on a subway bench.

Besides Hieronymous Bosch, his work has been compared to that of Frida Kahlo.

Influences

Palsa drew a great deal of influence from both the lives and works of numerous painters, writers and philosophers. Painters who influenced him include Magritte and Vincent van Gogh. His works include clear references to such people as Jean-Paul Sartre, Strindberg and Jean Genet, and many more subtle influences are listed on the first page of Eläkeläinen muistelee, where he mentions such kindred spirits as Jonathan Swift and Vladimir Lenin among many others.

Despite what could be referred to as intertextuality in his approach, scholars have observed that, although he continued to be active in his field until his passing in 1987, his body of work did not exhibit the postmodernist traits that were prevalent among many of his contemporaries.

Notable works

Palsa quotes