Tove Jansson Life, Art, Words

But every artist who depicts herself also depicts the times she lives in.

Cennini

Painting was her passion, but it was the Moomin stories that brought her to the notice of the public at large. She became a megastar in the 1950s, when her Moomin strip series took off in England

For Viktor the little snapshots and Signe’s letters were all he had to alleviate his longing for his daughter

Viktor Jansson’s dream became reality. Tove became an artist whose pictures and writings would carry the name Jansson far beyond the borders of Finland and Europe

she learned the most important lesson of all; as she put it herself: ‘to find the Pictures and the Words: the things that will never end’.

There is something about Tove Jansson and her art that wakens passionate feelings, an urge to communicate, to love and to own

‘It’s dangerous with old letters, and difficult to understand that they come from a world that no longer exists if you can’t breathe life into it – and I can’t,’

‘When you write a book you do it for yourself and you describe various sides of yourself in it,’ said Tove in an unusually frank interview before publication.

Try telling your inner voice to go to hell sometimes, let yourself enjoy a bit of fun and relax

‘Silence’, ‘serenity’, ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ – these were the words Tove was now using to describe her life.

Streaks of exhaustion can be detected in some of her notes, a longing for calm and seclusion.

The traveller has no ties, with no responsibility for what lies behind him and with no possibility of foreseeing what lies ahead. What he has is ‘Just a huge serenity.’

Her need to express herself constantly drove her on

Sun City is a story that reminds us of the decay of the body, of the slow disappearance of speech, of the fragility of memory, a story of the desire or affinity that can give old age substance, and how this in turn can vanish too.

‘All good art is life, and everything that is an expression of what is living and real must make the world a better place,’

Freedom, she is saying, is not freedom if it can’t cope with solitude.

‘I have noticed that being alone, for good and ill, and freedom, and responsibility, and compassion play a large part in what I write. I think one writes more about one’s unsolved problems than about the solutions one has reached; one describes more than one explains.’

I’ve started to write but of course I’ve no idea yet what will come of it. The main thing is I’ve made a start.

Islands relate to loneliness and closeness, openness and separateness. They are a metaphor for freedom

American psychologist Karen Horney, and in particular her famous book Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realisation