The stories behind my art: “Dreamgirl”

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“Dreamgirl” by Mia Makila, 2012 (digital mixed media)

I created the digital piece “Dreamgirl” in 2012, 3 years after I took the photograph of my muse Domenique that I used as a base for the digital artwork.

The photo session with Domenique was inspired by “The Last Sitting” – by Bert Stern where he snapped the last pictures of Marilyn Monroe before they were featured in Vogue the same year she died.

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From “The Last Sitting” photo session by Bert Stern (1962) where Marilyn Monroe where posing officially for the last time in her life.

My original photograph of Domenique that I used for “Dreamgirl”:

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My original photo of my muse Domenique, posing as Marilyn, inspired by Stern’s pictures.

I also made two other versions of “Dreamgirl” by painting and adding new details and textures to the original fine art print:

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Outtakes from my Marilyn photo session with Domenique: DSC_0135sssmarilyn14DSC_0219aaasmarilyn31DSC_0339

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This is one of my favorite paintings I’ve ever done (“That girl in The Piano movie just wet her pants between takes, 1993”) – I will base my new collection of works on the style of it.

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My sunshine is not for sale

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 My sunshine. Precious and wild. Sacred. You can’t steal it, buy it, denounce it, ignore it, degrade it, distort it, hide it, judge it, ban it, claim it, shame it, destroy it, punish it, expel it, stain it, fuck it, hate it, reduce it, ridicule it, condemn it.

It is mine.

It is me.

Where is home?

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I am sitting on a bus on my way to Stockholm to see a friend. I haven’t gone back all by myself since the break up and the moving out of his house last summer. I feel conflicted inside. Am I going away or returning home? I look at the shifting landscapes outside the windows of the bus, like I’m rewinding life or speeding it up, somewhere between my hometown and Stockholm. Where is home anyway? Perhaps it’s wherever I am at the time, inside myself – but isn’t that just a cliché? I don’t feel at home in every place I visit just because I am present inside myself. Perhaps home is in the love from my American lover, but that makes home a risky place, if he would leave, he would take my home with him. Can you really put your home in someone else’s hands? Maybe we are building an invisible home together, from each side of the world, and one day we can move in there, wherever it might be. I just have to wait and see.

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Perhaps home is my apartment. Or my studio. A place of familiar things and routines. A place where I can rule and reign like a queen. I don’t have a lot of friends, I’m kind of a loner, so right now my apartment could be anywhere, in any city or on any planet.

I close my eyes and I feel the vibrations of the bus and its soothing noise from the engine. When I really think about it, when I go deeper inside, I know home is in my creativity, in my art and in every creative expression I put out there for the world to see. Home is the Universe I can create with my imagination and my talent. Home is in the truth I find in the unleashing, in the limitless explorations of my inner self. In the place where reality and magic meet and mesh. In the blurred out boundaries between life and dreams.

But that makes my home a place of fantasies. Where things are more real inside myself than outside my own head. Where is the line between the imagination of an artist, and simple madness?

And if that’s my true home, then I won’t ever find it anywhere else on this planet.

Well, except for the invisible home I’m slowly building together with another dreamer.

The stories behind my art: “Grim Reaper – [Daisy Adair]”

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“Grim Reaper – [Daisy Adair]” by Mia Makila, 2007

I remember making Grim Reaper – [Daisy Adair] in late 2007 very clearly, because it was the first painting where I felt like I had found something new and exciting in my color palette. I had gained weight due to my depression at the time, and I was totally hooked on sugar and candy and it’s reflected in my art as well – in the palette and in the sugary and playful tone of the style.

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a contemporary grim reaper – Daisy Adair, Dead like me (2003)

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Portrait of a young Marie Antoinette (1762)

The inspiration for Grim Reaper came from unexpected sources: the modern grim reapers of Dead Like Me, an american comedy-horror series that I was watching at the time, Marie Antoinette, Mark Ryden, Disney – and one day I was making whipped cream for a cake, and I just looked down at the perfect white ripples in the bowl and got inspired by the texture – so I used it in the face, and it has become a trademark for my art, the wrinkly demon faces.

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the texture of whipped cream

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work in progress shots

My Grim Reaper painting has been featured many times in art magazines, even on the cover of Swedish horror magazine Eskapix and the French art magazine – Freak Wave (but notice how they used an early version of the painting, without the color splashes).

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