”No silent devil”

A native of Ylitornio, Lapland, Anni Ylävaara, a.k.a. Rosa Liksom, was a friend and fellow artist of Kalervo Palsa’s in his last years. Rosa Liksom’s article Van Gogh on the Road is published in the exhibition book Kalervo Palsa: Toinen tuleminen. She was interviewed by Jyrki Simovaara, an educational curator at Kiasma.

How did you meet Kalervo Palsa?

I first saw a painting by Palsa in Kunsthalle Helsinki in the young artists’ exhibition in the 1970s. The name of the painting was Kotiinpaluu(’homecoming’). In it, a man sits in the middle of snow inside his cabin. The atmosphere is desolate and empty. The painting haunted me, and only years later I learned that the artist who painted it, Kalervo Palsa, came from Kittilä. I met Palsa at the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Lapland, in 1986. At that time I already knew more about his art. Ever since our first meeting, it felt like we’d always known each other. I found it easy to communicate with him.

You come from Ylitornio and lived in Rovaniemi in 1986–87. Did you keep in touch with Palsa during those years?

I visited Palsa in Kittilä several times and always spent the day there. Palsa had a remarkable library at home. He read a lot, and always remembered to praise Strindberg to me. We’d leaf through art books he’d ordered from abroad. He introduced me to the works of Otto Dix and Hieronymus Bosch. Sometimes we’d also leaf through porn magazines, which Palsa had a lot of. Palsa also showed me his comics and sex toys, and he’d laugh about his own perverse fantasies. He was also interested in the aesthetics of Nazism, and sadism.
I never wanted to stay for the night, because Palsa’s cabin was usually so filthy that staying overnight was not a very pleasant thought.

What was Palsa like as a person?

Palsa had at least two personalities. The drunken Palsa was an obnoxious creature. Kind-hearted, but going on and on about the same thing. When drunk , Palsa drove me mad and I threw him out of my house several times. The sober Palsa was an intelligent interlocutor, and a feminine man in a very special way. Kind and humane, no silent devil. I think Palsa was a very balanced person, although his journals don’t always convey that picture. He had emotional intelligence, and he was very sharp. He liked to view himself as an outsider, and laugh at himself. Although pornography and sex interested him from an artistic point of view, he had a lot of respect for women. I’m sure he would’ve been an extremely loving husband and father, but he drifted to the path of a lonely man. Palsa was a real gentleman, not some barbarian.

You helped Palsa in the Pelin exhibition in 1987. How did Palsa’s art strike you in the art world of the time?

Colleagues from Lapland were afraid that Palsa’s works would be sold immediately and too cheap. Some went as far as to say that Palsa’s works shouldn’t be sold at all. This shows how much Palsa was appreciated among artists from Lapland. Well, Palsa had his exhibition. Hardly anything was sold. People were not ready to embrace Palsa’s black world.

Palsa saw himself as an important artist, and never underestimated his works. He loved his paintings so that he wouldn’t have wanted to sell them, not even to his friends. This despite the fact that he often complained about how no one wanted to buy his works.

What did Palsa think of your art?

The most prominent thing in my art is a happy feeling. Palsa liked my work and encouraged me. When I asked him whether I should go to art school, he said that art schools are for those who are looking for themselves. Palsa also liked my books, and had read them even before we met. We understood each other really well, when it came to subject matter and our outlook on life. I’d had an easier time of it, because I belong to a younger generation. I however understood completely where Kalle was coming from, where his pictures came from. It has nothing to do with being from Lapland, it is universal.

What did you think of his literary output?. Palsa let me read his journals. I thought they were strong stuff, and outstanding from a literary point of view. He said that he’d written them to be published, but only after his death. I told him to write a novel. He seemed pleased but snorted that Timo K. Mukka had written into novels that which he painted into pictures. That settled the matter.