Fuse graffiti with action painting, splash buckets of silver on sides of trains. That might give you a hint of what Sami Lukkarinen's painting are about. But on closer inspection, the paintings are revealed to have a solid digital foundation. Jon Sundell met up with the artist and talked about the art and craft.

Jon Sundell: Your paintings differ significantly from the usual way graffiti has presented itself in the realm of high art, like in the 1980's art scene in New York, for example. Graffitis in your paintings are not bright and colourful but drab and void of all the traditional aesthetic virtues of graffiti. Plain silver paintings are also probably the most hated form of graffiti according to the general public.

Sami Lukkarinen: What I've seen, the silver ones posses the most effective language. When you try to bring the world of graffiti into the realm of high art, it usually tries to adapt to traditional ideas of aesthetics and notions of beauty. It loses its power, which in my opinion comes from the fact that it's criminal or illegal. That's the element that gives it an edge. On the other hand, painted trains are extremely dynamic onto themselves, especially if you have these gigantic letters made only with silver and black. I like it on so many levels. It's, in a way, a layer on top of reality, which I see only as a plus, as an added value. If I had to choose between a clean and a painted car, I would always ride the painted one.

JS: Even if graffitis have used silver extensively, in your paintings it comes across as something very novel. Silver somehow captures the primal energy of graffiti: destruction, instead of creation of beauty.

SL: Indeed. And when the painting has only a few colours, I'm able to charge the paintings even further. The elements and details remain somehow effective and big, which makes it more effective and easier to paint. If I would have more colours the painting process and the tools would have to be different. It provides a good contrast to the colours in the background. Also if you look at Finnish paintings, there's nobody out there that uses silver which was helpful. It felt fresh right from the start. I had painted a lot in black and white, so it was very close to that but also gave something more to it. The thick alkyl paint also produces a really nice texture.

JS: You don't use spray paint. How do you justify your choice of technique to, say a graffiti writer?

SL: I personally feel it's something very natural. I have no graffiti background myself and my way of painting comes from fine arts. Before I started to paint these trains, I strived to develop a more effective language, or a language of effects, and to expand my selection of means. I always feel that I'm creating an additional layer, a layer of effects, and its purpose is not to be a picture of the original graffiti or the graffiti train. I often start painting pretty carefully, sometimes I even use some spray paint; then I break it up with a thick layer of silver paint, in order to get this impression, the impression of layers. It is also done to get this dynamic effect connected to that sort of randomness, movement and the moment itself, the moment when I do it and pour the paint.

JS: If we think about the subject matter of your paintings... You're originally from Jyväskylä where, I doubt, graffiti has ever been particularly visible.

SL: True, I can't really remember anything. The interest was sparked after moving to Helsinki. It took me about a year before I started to understand what they were about. First I started collecting tags and then slowly incorporate them into my paintings. Being an outsider, in a way, makes me see things more clearly and keeps me away from all the pitfalls - particularly the notions of style. You just choose purely what you like and what looks effective, or to put it more harshly, stuff that I can utilise or exploit.

JS: Your lack of knowledge has in a way liberated you from all the codes and conventions?

SL: That's probably very true. When I started picking up on all the discipline and shackles of graffiti, I consciously put blinders on and tried to avoid learning more. I only strived to develop my own thing and get it to bloom. In the beginning I was slightly torn, should I pay more respect to the original, but this feels a lot better. When you have this distance, there's this clarity of vision that enables you to highlight and bring forth the right things. If you're too close to things, your view will always be somewhat distorted.

JS: With no background in graffiti, you yourself seem to be totally lacking any sort of 'street credibility', and completely unaware of its strict commands and code of honour, and yet, your paintings are probably the most street credible representations of graffiti ever seen in galleries.

SL: When a language of codes gets more and more refined, it most often loses some of it's power and impact. They're also two different worlds, graffiti and the art world. You can't expect that if you import something from one medium to the other, its impact stays the same. First and foremost I strive to make good and effective art and the subject matter is a part of the packet. If my only concern would be the graffiti, the result might be a lot blander and I probably would need to do much more explaining and tinkering with details. But because I'm doing this within the whole tradition of picture making and picture manipulation, I'm only interested in doing something effective and good-looking.

JS: The internet, as your source for images, plays an essential part in what you do.

SL: Yes. This whole project is a part of what I've named Resolution 72. Realising that there's nothing really behind those digital images, that they're immaterial. If you zoom in on them, they, in a way, evade you and their sharpness is revealed to be pretty crude. This makes it easier to transform them into art and manipulate them further. You're allowed to rework and crop them as you please and you're also not faced with all the theories and demands presented by photorealism. On the other hand it also helps that one isn't forced to travel to another city every week, when you can find interesting material in fifteen minutes on the web. The selection process has always been very important to me.

JS: The selection of which graffiti you're gonna paint?

SL: Yeah, not base it on some theoretical construction, but to select anything that catches my eye and genuinely excites me. That enthusiasm is, in a way, a guarantee of good quality. It makes you work eagerly and the result is often much better than if you try to force yourself.

JS: There seems to be a sort of a pattern here I can't put a finger on: You, coming from a small city, move to a bigger one and start painting extremely urban images... Then the internet, possibly the ultimate form of detachment, becomes a critical link in your work, enabling you to paint trains from distant metropolises from the comfort of your home...

SL: Yes, it all boils down to the word digital. I don't make a big fuss about it, but I think in time it will become more apparent as it's quite a fundamental element in what I do. The word photoshoprealism describes pretty accurately what I'm doing. When I started with this, I saw an interesting analogy between the digital world and graffiti: If you think about tags and how every letter can be stylised and written in a million different ways, you could envision a computer system that, instead of being based on the infinite combinations of binary figures 0 and 1, would be based on this infinite palette of variation. Every letter could refer to a thousand different things. This seemed like a very interesting idea.

JS: If you think about it, there's this assembly line going on here: The graffiti artist makes a sketch, paints the train according to this sketch, then somebody, maybe the artist, takes a picture of the painting, a picture which, in fact, is created out of several pictures joined together. Then the pictures are scanned and turned into digital files made available on the internet where you, thousands of miles away, find them, print them out and use as a basis of your paintings. Firstly, this reminds of the kids game called telephone and secondly, hints at the whole notion of the simulacrum, the copy without an original.

SL: There's definitely an endless bundle of thoughts and theories that spring to mind concerning this. You know, the assembly line doesn't stop with my painting, the painting can acquire a life of it's own, being reproduced, referred to and possibly being displayed on the net in some form, possibly even next to the picture of the graffiti. Digital imaging certainly poses a whole array of new questions. Concerning the debate on copy vs. original, to me it seems that the copy is often much more potent. In an art book for example, the reproduced master piece is backed up by analysis and praises by writers and critics. That writing gives the work meaning and significance the work on its own wouldn't necessarily carry across. Besides, I don't necessarily feel like I'm making a copy of anything. The original picture is not that important to me, it's more like raw material I use to make my painting.

JS: Parts of that assembly line are still visible in your paintings. You, for example, break up your paintings on several canvases, just like the picture that was made out of joining several photos together.

SL: Yeah, it gives my paintings a natural rhythm. Sometimes I stress it further and make the pieces more clearly different in size. It's just an effect among all other effects. I feel it gives something more to them and enhances them further. They acquire movement. The trains being, of course, very dynamic onto themselves already. Using these imperfect pictures gives the paintings also these natural sorts of aberrations.

JS: When it comes to the energy charge of graffiti, it has been almost impossible to capture that on canvases. You don't only capture it, but manage to outshines the original in this sense.

SL: The tradition of interpretation and analysis is so long in painting, that if you manage to bring some fresh elements to it, even small variations can have a big impact. Fresh elements also make it palpable that something has a lot of meaning and that it radiates and has multiple references. The original picture or painting doesn't vanish or disappear anywhere, it's part of the puzzle. What I do is an addition - the effect.

JS: You don't seem to be interested in creating your own images, you prefer to use existing ones?

SL: I've always done that. It makes this selection process possible when there's millions of things to choose from. It's hard for me to maintain that I would be living such an interesting life that I could, or even have the nerve to, make pictures out of it. I haven't even thought about this in years. It's just so logical for me to choose from the multitude of things that interests me, and transform them to another language, the language of art.

JS: If you feel that you can't use your own life or experiences as a basis or as a resource for your images, are you faced with any qualms, qualms of your paintings being mere surface, for example?

SL: Not exactly. I've divided the paintings into background and effect, and they can be developed on purely visual basis. In art, every time you manage to create something that's new, it attains a lot of interpretation and depth. If you use electronic music as an analogy, the question never arises if something is 'authentic', the question is, if it's 'new'. The dance floor judges only the end result, not the process of creation. So if something works on a purely visual basis, it's already a value onto itself. In a way you could compare me to a DJ using samples and creating his own mixes and original work out of existing material.

JS: You're about to graduate from the Academy of Fine in a year. As an up-and-coming artist, do you have anything resembling career strategies?

SL: Nothing specific really. The stuff abroad interests me naturally, especially as the imagery might be much more appropriate there. I don't feel like my imagery is in any way particularly Finnish. Everything in the art world moves so slowly. If somebody likes something, it can take years before it will manifest itself in any way. The processes are very slow. There's really nothing else you can do besides be enthusiastic about what you do and work hard. So far there hasn't been a need for me to start bombarding people with phone calls, make demands or play dirty.

JS: How does stuff like Saatchi's million pound purchases or other such shock tactics sound like?

SL: They always require their context. In Finland where anything is allowed, the reactions are always milder. I doubt that stuff would work over here. You could say that a bunch of Finland's more radical artists could have been really big names in the 90's Britain. Their imagery was that potent. The reactions here are somewhat mild which has an effect on what you're doing, keeping everything on a smaller scale. But I don't know... it just feels good painting the way I do.

JS: Why do you think the reactions are milder?

SL: Our mentality, I guess. It's probably also due to the money involved. In Finland there's not a lot of it around, which tends to weed out from the extreme ends of culture. And in England, in an old class system, it's probably easier to shock. This Scandinavian thing tends to tolerate almost anything.

JS: Before painting graffiti, you used advertising, fashion advertising in particular, as your motif. Do you see a link between the two?

SL: The link for me would be in picture manipulation, the selection, the layering, dynamic picture creation, this stuff I call photoshoprealism. Other than that I don't know.

JS: But you don't see, for example, that both are basically trying to do the same thing...

SL: Yeah, there's this struggle for lebensraum going on in both cases, definitely. And it's very interesting to see them side by side or on top of each other. And advertising utilises all possible sorts of languages, graffiti included, which can bring about very interesting layers. They come, in the end, from the opposites ends of the spectrum in society. On this note, it would be quite interesting to advertise my exhibition on the side of trains with pictures of my graffiti-like paintings, and maybe have a real graffiti next to such an advert. That could be quite an interesting combination, and possibly cause a public outcry.

JS: It's interesting that graffiti writers, from all places, tend to gravitate towards advertising agencies, coming from such an anarchistic background.

SL: Maybe there's a similar sort of discipline in the world of advertising, and possibly in stuff like web pages design, too. In all cases you work under all these strict codes and try to improve and polish something or find a tiny new thing within the given limitations. In art, on the other hand, when everything can be done, small improvements like fine tuning a little letter pale in comparison to stuff like dipping a shark in a tub of formaldehyde.