Kivi Larmola
b.1966 Helsinki, Finland

A quick sketch of a self-portrait

I see myself as a storyteller, conveying feelings and emotions and sculpting the everyday fantastic. So what does that mean?

Draughtsman's skills need constant practice and learning, but even those skills are secondary to the ability to see, understand and adapt what you've learned. The story is a tool for transmitting experience and emotion on a personal level. Politics is our everyday choices and actions, and even when our aims and values differ, we're very much alike in our wants and needs.

Storytelling is an art of timing, so that the reaction to the turns in the story hits the audience on the right moment. It's also leaving out just enough, so that the members of the audience can fill the story on personal level and become a part of it. It's also a play in dynamics, for there is no fast without slow, and no dark without light, it's all a matter of relation.

This is pretty universal, and as a storyteller I'm not tied to any one medium. The comics are a good medium with enormous amount of challenge and variety, but the music is just as good.

The fine arts are wonderful for they can be worked without considering the reproduction of which there is none, and literature allows so much space to the readers imagination that the written word is perhaps the most efficient form of message.

Those are the tools on which I work. But it all starts and ends with a story, and the story must contain a bit of me.

A recording megalomaniac on Megamania Records in 1992.