Joa Korhonen is known for a long and respected career as a musician. Altogether nine albums by his main band SARA, a solo project ATSTTTS (As They Slowly Travel to the Sea) as well as an album by Meadow Island, and a trilogy of EP's as part of Pedestrian's Motor have largely been written by Korhonen. Over the past 15 years Korhonen used songwriting as his main vessel to transfer and transmit emotions and emotional landscapes.

Still everything could not be said. A need for an alternative vessel reinforced.

Alongside his music Korhonen has constantly worked on visual arts not only for his own amusement, but also for the cover art of his album releases as well as other visual components of his bands and musical projects. Becoming active as a painting artist was a natural channel for artistic expression while SARA decided to take a break from touring and recording in 2013.

Paintings of faces started to surface. Intuitively at first, even randomly or by accident. The paintings started out from rough and partial sketches which Korhonen calls suggestions:

"A suggestion of an eye, for example, might suddenly surface. The strokes often were almost random. Vision started to focus and depth appeared to quickly build into the work, a layer by layer. In my own opinion, my best works are in a way composed of layers and layers of these random strokes.”

The meanings behind the faces begun to clarify in time. "A human being can express an almost unlimited amount of emotions by facial expressions. In my works the actual facial expressions are fairly stagnant and similar to each other, yet the emotional landscapes communicated by the paintings are vastly different from each other. The meaning and theme of an individual painting usually opens itself to me at the finishing stages. “The process feels authentic and pure."

Even today, the works consist of layers. Now the layers first create a shape to grasp and eventually revealing the body position and gaze direction. The form captures and gives birth to the whole story behind the character. The artistic production originally focused on the face has discovered a new perspective on half body frames that incorporate movement and mood.

New works have been created in a digital environment to which accustoming began in early 2019. Sketches are still generated unplanned, despite the chances of returning to previous phases and various experiments are endless. The new way of working makes it possible to sketch the paintings almost anywhere. When the work moves from the screen to the canvas, some changes are still happening, but the imprint of the sketch, the color scheme and the mood remain. The multi-layered nature of the sketches makes the painting process special and interesting for its creator. "The new works seem clearer than before," comments Korhonen. “The vision has become clearer over the years and right now it feels like I’m finding my own footprint and style. The journey is yet only at the beginning - I hope the visual art that emerges through me will live and evolve over the years or even for decades."