A Portrait of a Girl with Changing Hair Colour

This is a sandy painting in delicate shades, depicting a girl with a pensive face. The girl is sitting on something yellow that might very well be a rock, hot from the sun. Flowers grow out of the vague room - youth, summer and warmth are the keywords that characterise "The Portrait of a Girl" painted by Owe Büttner.
"I began with the painting in the spring of 1988. The model came to sit for me over the intervals of several weeks. Every time the colour of her hair was totally different, so I gave up observing the model. The portrait increasingly started to remind of a picture taken of my mother as a young girl. Frequently we rather chatted than painted. Sometimes she brought her girlfriends, too. Now and then, posing turned into a painting lesson; we made small flower paintings from memory.
In 1991 I finished the painting, adding peonies in the summer. First I thought that the picture might be titled "Innocence", because the girl had no sweetheart. Then it simply remained "The Portrait of a Girl"," Owe Büttner tells the story of the origin of the painting in his studio apartment at Mustamägi.
In autumn 1991 "The Portrait of a Girl" was displayed at my personal exhibition in Tallinn Art Hall Gallery. Several years later it was exposed in Brinkkala Art Gallery of Turku Cultural Centre. "At the time of this show my mother died and I had a car accident," Büttner recalls. The painting was also damaged - some Finnish art lover, who had visited the exhibition, must have wanted to give the girl the mortal blow and made a cut at her knee. The painting needed restoration.
"At my first personal exhibition a man occasionally stepped in from the street and said that he would like to buy the picture. Mentioned a considerable amount of money. Later he organised several exhibitions of my works in Sweden at his own expense," the artist talks of the fate of the picture.
On the 17th of April Owe Büttner opens an exhibition of his pointillistic works in Anton Hansen Tammsaare Memorial Museum that should offer the public the joy from a safe deja vu. On the 27th of May totally different Büttner can be seen in the Sammas Gallery. The artist expresses his relationships with life, death, god and love in a surprisingly classical manner. The artist is planning to paint thirteen canvases for the show, titled "Parnassus and Calvary". He is currently toiling at these works.