The state stopped funding the Free Art School – headmaster: ‘We have to spend too much time to keep the school open’

The opportunities to study to become a visual artist have narrowed, but the Free Art School is still going strong.

Natural light filters through a white blind into the studio, where about twenty students concentrate on painting a living model at the Free Art School in Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki.

It takes four years to prepare for a career as a painter, and in recent years the private art school has attracted, at best, around a hundred applicants a year. The intensive selection course, which focuses on landscape painting, lasts a week, and about one in four are accepted.

He is a successful artist in his own right, whose work has most recently been shown at the Turku Art Museum and Galerie Anhava in Helsinki. Merenmies has been the director of the Free Art School since 2020.

The ninety -year -old school has a well -established place as an educational institution for practical instruction in painting. The school is a curiosity in the field of art.

– We teach thoroughly the practices of painting art. Its teaching has long been reduced internationally in art schools.

– Applicants are very motivated. Everyone has an idea of \u200b\u200bhow huge the subject is painting, says the seafarer.

Free Art School lost important support

The state has cut the funding of art and culture, and the traces are also reflected in free art school.

As a private school, it raises its funding from a variety of sources, and public support has been one of the school’s financial channels. The Art Promotion Center (Taike) has funded free art school for decades. In recent years, the aid was between EUR 100,000 and 30,000,000, but this year the situation changed. The school was completely without Taike support.

The same went to another private art school, an art school that operates in Suomenlinna. The end of Taike’s support did not come as a complete surprise to the Rector of the Free Art School. The school is currently looking for new sources of financing.

\”We have to make more effort to create and grow other sources of money,\” says the seafarer.

Work has a price. Instead of focusing on a free art school, the time and resources are spent on fundraising.

-If there was more financial matters, we could focus more on internationalization or different opportunities this school has. Now we have to spend too much time to keep the school, says the seafarer.

Until last year, the free art school and the Art School received Taike’s operating grant.

Small art schools stem from counter-thinking

Rautio recalls that both the free art school and the art school were once born as a reaction to the mainstream of fine arts education.

The Art School The country was founded in 1984 and the free art school started operations in 1935.

-The history of visual arts is the history of such small schools in contrastination.

The roots of the phenomenon extend to the 19th century in Europe. As modern art evolved alongside the academics, schools began to emerge, whose concept of art was different from the ideals of the academy. According to Rautio, it is important that there are schools where teaching or a student of the pupils form a slightly different view of what good contemporary art would be.

According to Raution, the polyphony of artist education supports the wealth of visual arts.

– If we had only one or two art schools, the situation in contemporary art would be deficient.

– All polytechnics have a certain nature. Fine art education is very different from the rest of the education in the fact that art education does not teach facts but their interpretation, and the ways in which interpretation can be many, Rautio says.

Artist training narrowed

In Finland, artist education is basically part of the public education system. At the university level, universities and polytechnics provide education. In addition, there are about twenty folk high schools in Finland that provide non -degree art studies. Their number has remained stable in the last 20 years.

However, from the point of view of studying opportunities, the role of visual arts as part of the education system has declined in recent decades, says a survey by the Cupore Cultural Policy Research Center.

The change is particularly reflected in polytechnics. You could study as a visual artist at seven polytechnics in 2011. Now there are five schools. One of them is the Academy of Art of Turku University of Applied Sciences. There, there is a sense of art education in visual arts.

According to Erävaara, artist education at polytechnics has remained stable in recent years and has also been strengthened in Turku.

– Turku is the best place to study visual arts, as the city has a well-established museum and gallery and art associations. When a student opens the door of the Academy of Arts, he or she is already part of this Turku fine art field, says Erävaara.

*Repair 15.4. at 7.10 pm Imatra Art School (Bachelor of Arts) was still in Imatra in 2011, not in Lappeenranta, as the map first claimed.*