HOW I BECAME AN ARTIST-1

I had a girlfriend during high school who I really liked. But I was such a timid little thing and I was no doubt slow to develop sexually, so she left me and started to see other, more active boys. In addition to the fact that I was timid and meek, I also had an extraordinarily fragile spirit, so this was all a very traumatic experience for me which took me many months to recover from.
And since I knew for a fact, that art didn't interest her in the slightest, I decided to become an artist as a form of revenge on everyone.

HOW I BECAME AN ARTIST-2

One non-specific summer day, on my way to go swimming in the lake, I fell off my bike and hit my head so badly, it left a hole in the ground. Since I went to bicycle training in those days, it was a racing bike and since the road wound down a hill, the speed must've been pretty high. Around 50-60 km/hr perhaps. I had just assumed a great aerodynamic position, where my back-end was really high and my head down low above the front tire, when all of a sudden a gust of wind pulled the plastic bag containing my towel and dry underwear, from my hand and between the front spokes. Even though both my and the bike's flights were impressive and reasons to fear the worst were plentiful, I did not have any real physical injuries. Except for the fact that my wonderful, green track suit from Czechoslovakia was ripped a little on my backside and the bike had entirely lost its initial shape. And a bump rose on my head in a matter of seconds, the likes of which I had never seen before and which ultimately covered at least a third of my head. I picked up my bike, went home and kept on with my usual, quiet life.
Soon not very important, albeit noteworthy changes began to take place within me. Namely, my totally average straight hair suddenly went curly. First in the front, then on the sides and finally all over my head. Then my ability to grasp math and science, which was already fairly weak, was reduced to practically nothing and was replaced by some kind of bizarre, undirected creativity and dreams in which I felt as if all kinds of supernatural powers were speaking with me. It was as if someone had started shaping me into something which I myself had no idea about.
In retrospect I can say that as a result of all of this my life became much more interesting than it was before. But I didn't know it at the time.

HOW I BECAME AN ARTIST-3

In high school, my friend and I held discos at the local cultural centre. And in order for people to know when to come, it was my job to create nice-looking and fairly eye-catching posters. I made them by looking for interesting details in children's books, re-drawing them and mixing them into a colourful assortment. The colours blended seamlessly and everything. In the middle of all this beauty was the word DISCO and when and where it was to be held. The technique was watercolour on ink paper, which I made waterproof by rubbing it over with a cemetery candle. And all of them, however many of them were needed had to be identical, so they would look like they had been printed. We then hung them everywhere after night had fallen and everybody liked them a lot.
But one time my good friend Ahti, who also liked my posters, came and said that his intelligent wife, who happened to be a teacher thought that they totally useless posters since the whole thing was simply drawn be coping off something and not at all original. I then felt so sorry for myself that I cried for many days straight, nor did I sleep a wink that whole time. And since then I have never done that again.

HOW I BECAME AN ARTIST-4

My sister knew how to draw super well and I didn't at all. This made me tremendously jealous and I kept secretly practising, to not be all that much worse than my sister. But I really wasn't all that good at it and so it was that if there were some more important assignments (homework to be graded, all kinds of drawing and poster competitions and so on), then I let her do them. In so doing I even won a mask contest and an illustration competition whose prize was a plate.