Riikka Sormunen puts blind trust in her daydreams to create intricate escapist paintings

Before Riikka Sormunen turned her creative focus to painting, and consequently transformed her bedroom into a full-time studio, the artist studied fashion design and worked as an illustrator for over a decade. These past lives apparent in her delicate attention to colour, pattern work and adornment in her painted scenes, Riikka “loves to take time to design each object, fabric, room and garden featured in her work”, she tells us.

The painter now predominantly works in water-mixable oil paints on linen, exploring themes of “pleasure, posing, sensory overload and pareidolia” with her detailed brush strokes. Although many of her works are imaginings drawn from her “excessive daydreaming”, Riikka starts her process by carefully planning out each piece’s composition “mentally practising methods of paint application”. Despite every character’s pose and every prop’s position being calculated, “to stop being a complete control freak”, Riikka likes to “leave areas for intuitive pattern design — like improvising within a practised choreography”, she says. As for her subject matter, the artist has a similar desire to “blindly surrender to the process”.

For the things she looks to for inspiration, Riikka loves the early paintings of Lucien Freud, Ukiyo-e, the detailed style of Japanese woodblock printing, and the ethereal works of Inka Essenhigh — all wonderful puzzle pieces that map together to make sense of just some of the elements of her unique, playful and escapist style.