Virpi Talvitie: Finland ★ Illustrator

“I hope that my pictures open up in different ways to different people of different ages.”

Virpi Talvitie

Born in Ostrobothnia, on the North-West coast of Finland, in 1961, Virpi Talvitie originally trained as a graphic artist, and her early work was for newspapers and journals. She began illustrating books for children in 1998, and has since produced ten picture books and illustrated about fifty other books, including novels, poetry, fairy tales and nonfiction. Her background as a graphic designer and an illustrator for adults is evident in her work as a children’s illustrator, especially in the way she creates cross-over texts with elements that are intended to resonate differently with adults and children. The aspect of her work that has drawn most critical attention has been her ability to express emotions.

Talvitie uses a mixture of oil pastels, crayon, water color and collage to create her images. Bold, thick layers of oil and wax form the main structures of her illustrations. She scratches and etches into these to produce texture and detail. Watercolors are added to the surface creating patterns of droplets, which offer a sense of movement and also emphasize the mood of the picture. Typically, Talvitie produces several paintings for each spread and then forms a collage from different paintings. As a result, the original pieces have a slightly different feel from the images in the books, and Talvitie makes a point of showing the original works in various exhibitions around the country.

In Finland, Talvitie is best known for the trilogy of picturebooks she produced with Timo Parvela, the first of which—Keinulauta [The See Saw]—won the highest prize for Finnish children’s books: the Finlandia junior prize. The translation rights have been sold for Chinese, Russian, Korean, Serbian, German, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese, Danish and Swedish publications. The three books, which are intended for children who are just learning to read independently, explore the nature of friendship and provide highly quotable phrases that are applicable to many everyday situations, for example, “A see-saw won’t work if no-one sits at the other end” and “Sometimes, letting someone else play on the see-saw can make you happy.” The illustrations alter the rhythm of the text so that sometimes the young reader faces a double spread of text with only a small illustration in the corner, at other times the pace is slowed down to a single statement on a page.

Talvitie has also collaborated with Katri Tapola, an author from the same parish. Several of Tapola’s novels are set in the region in which the women grew up. Together they have already produced six books including poetry, easy readers, and picture books.