Beyond The Thought - paintings and music

Pekka Airaksinen (1945–2019) was born in Helsinki. He was a painter, musician, composer and a teacher of meditation. He became known especially as a pioneer of electrical music, as a founding member of an underground movement from Helsinki and as an originator of the Tibetian Art Center.

During the later half of the 60’s Pekka was establishing an art collective called Harvesters, which was active from the 70’s. The group organised exhibitions, that widely included different forms of art, and so called Happenings, performances. Harvesters founded an art gallery called Cheap Thrills in Helsinki.

The starting point for all the things that Pekka created was Buddhist meditation. He made notes of the patterns and colours that he saw in meditative state and started to turn his noted into paintings. The pictures that ended up on canvases were ”merely a pale glimpse” of what he had seen while meditating. The paintings included mathematical formulas and symbolism as also did the music he composed. Essential was to be renewed and to shy from definitions, art and music was made to be experienced, not to be explained.