Iikka Lehtinen

Grow into an artist

Another big name for me was Salvador Dali. It’s hard to say whether it was Dali’s paintings or the person himself that impressed me as a child. In any case, I really liked this crazy painter and his surrealist visions that colored my everyday life in my childhood. I then became convinced that I wanted to become a similar artist.

Later, my interest in the forbidden fruit was rekindled. This time, I found Heavy Metal comic books on the shelf, Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled and Sin city, Enki Bilal’s Nikopol trilogy and Milo Manara’s Invisible Scent. Fascinated by art, I once again found treasures that I could read on summer nights. Miller’s black and white interpretation of the nihilistic Basin City was very different from what I was used to seeing in Donald Duck, not to mention the extremely violent ”Hard Boiled” cartoon illustrated by Geof Darrow. As a child, I had already adapted to the slightly special humor of ”Ren & Stimpy” and ”Monty Python”, so ”Hard Boiled” was quite easy to digest, even though its extreme violence was a bit too much at times. Manara’s storytelling was humorous and full of details in Darrow’s style, while Bilal’s art fascinated me with the dark atmosphere he created. Heavy Metal magazines were the social media for me at the time, offering lots of small clips from many different comic albums, educating me to see this culture from new perspectives. Without these moments of my childhood and teenage years, my art would probably look very different now.

Childhood and teenage years were also spent heavily on video games. My love for video games is still as strong as it was then, and as a passionate gamer, I also have to admit that my hobby may be reflected in my artistic expression, but indirectly. I don’t seek inspiration from game worlds per se, but subconsciously I think they have influenced my art over the years. As a child, I remember practicing drawing by looking at the pictures of game boxes and concept art notebooks. At least the Bioshock and Fallout series have definitely been the experiences that broadened my consciousness with this art genre.

If video games weren’t enough to shape my style in addition to comics and Giger, then 80s and 90s horror movies, sci-fi movies and fantasy movies shaped my artistic persona in an even more original direction. In my drawings, you can sometimes notice a somewhat similar atmosphere to those in these old movies and their posters. Other stylistic directions worth mentioning for my inspirations are: cyberpunk art, steampunk art and Post-Apocalyptic art, as well as band album cover art.

In my youth I was lost for a long time and wandered in the dark until one day I saw the light. This scared me at first because I didn’t understand what was happening. In the end, however, I accepted it as part of my life and now it guides me forward. Now I hope that my pictures would also awaken in you some similar experiences that I myself have experienced with art. So lose your soul in my art as I lost it in the art of others.

Until the light takes us all.

Yours sincerely,

Iikka