An essay on inherited memory, ancestral landscape, and the imagined country I carry in my surname. From a Finland I’ve never visited to the meadows of Barberry Hill in Vermont, this piece traces how place—real or remembered—becomes the source of my work.

I’ve Never Been to Finland

I stand in the middle of a vast expanse of earth mounds—hundreds of them, each no more than a foot high, pushing through the thin skin of ice. I balance on one small rise, reluctant to step onto the glassy surface for fear it will break. Frost patches scatter across the ice, breaking its clarity and revealing shallow depths, no more than a few feet. The mounds stretch endlessly ahead, behind, and to both sides, surrounded by half-frozen channels of moving water. I could, if I dared, leap from one to the next, but I remain still, silent, rooted.

In the distance lies a low, wide landmass. Beyond its thin shore rises a forest, a band of trees reaching left and right as far as I can see. Acres of pale-barked trunks stand bare, buds still hidden, punctuated by dark, conical firs that spiral upward behind them. At my feet, frost-stunned grasses cling to the mound, its crusted earth mottled in umber, ochre, gold, and charcoal. The hour of day is uncertain. The sky is heavy, layered in gray, blue-gray, and umber; a pale glow lingers at the horizon while ochre and pink light hesitates either to rise or to set. A soft blue cast pervades. The air is cold, but not painfully so. No wind stirs. No sound breaks the stillness.

And there I am. Six years old. Twelve. Twenty-four. Forty-eight. Older now. Always standing in the same place—an image I have never seen except in my mind, and one that has returned to me all my life. Sometimes it disappears for years, only to reappear without warning, as vivid and unchanging as before. Each time, I find myself once more upon the mound, encircled by ice and water, gazing toward birch and fir.

The place, I came to understand, is Finland—or something my mind insists is Finland, though I have never been there. My surname, Suokko, is the only piece of the country I actually carry. It came from my paternal ancestors, who emigrated to America at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was never anglicized or reshaped on arrival. In Finnish, suokko means something close to “wetland”—not the sodden negative of the English word swamp, but an essential and life-filled part of the landscape.

I did not grow up with stories of Finland. In my house, we did not speak the language; no photographs from the old country passed down. What passed down instead was the name, and with it, somehow, a country I have spent a lifetime picturing. I wonder whether the image of the mounds and the birch forest arrived in me the way a name arrives: intact, unexplained, carried through generations for reasons no one now remembers.

Perhaps this is why I am drawn to landscape in painting—not as a literal place, but as structure and atmosphere, familiar and unspecific, deeply felt more than concretely described. The landscapes I make are not Finland. They are not, in any strict sense, anywhere. But they come from somewhere. A painter, it turns out, can be formed by an inherited imagination he has never visited.

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Standing at the top of our meadow on Barberry Hill, I stop, catch a breath, and gaze west, where the ridges of our valley fold into mountains beyond. It is hot and dry. The sun is strong. It is midsummer, and the golden-green hillside holds acre-drifts of yellow, white, blue, and purple wildflowers—some in bloom, others in bud, many already gone to seed. I know what week of the month it is by the wildflowers, though I rarely remember their names. I have walked well over a mile before I begin my descent. Every twenty steps, a shift in elevation or direction opens a new view. In this heat, at this hour, the world is nearly silent—only my footsteps on the path, a few insects. Later, as the sun sets behind the ridge and the meadow cools, the birds will return. I’ll listen to their calls and to the chorus of crickets I will never see. For now, the air is still, the feeling sultry.

Heading home, with each step downhill, the horizon changes. Slowly, it rises above me. Tucked into the hillside, bridging meadow and woodland, is our house. The trail becomes a mown grass path that passes garden beds and leads to the terrace—our summer living room. I climb the stone steps and open the screen door. In the kitchen I pour a glass of cold water and walk across the creaky wood floor to the far end of the house. A covered porch connects to the studio—a commute of twenty-four feet, which I welcome. I open the door and step inside, ready to work, or to sit quietly.

Barberry Hill is home. Four hundred acres in a horseshoe valley—meadows, brooks, ponds, woodlands, steep hills and ridges, an old dirt road, hiking trails—a place that invites looking, exploring, and a life slowed down. Having lived here more than three decades, I have watched the seasons work on this place. Nothing stays fixed for long. Weather arrives in layers: autumn afternoons gone gray, winter snow falling blind, spring rain on wind, summer thunder over the ridge. A friend recently said that place is how I see—that Barberry Hill is where my inner vision becomes paintings for the outer world to see. He’s right. My work is an expression of place, of Barberry Hill. The long mountaintop views matter as much as the close attention to lichen and stone, to tree bark, leaf patterns, wildflowers—the far edges of the natural world and everything between. And then, distilling—through eye, arm, hand, finger, brush, canvas. If I lived anywhere else—a city, perhaps—I wonder what my work would become. What would it look like? Place becomes a way of looking, a way of being, and a way of making.

The Finland in my mind and the Vermont under my feet are not competitors for depiction. They are a single source seen from two directions. I paint from memory. I am not a plein air painter. I spend hours outdoors—walking, observing, remembering—but I do not paint there. In the studio I paint what the mind has kept—from that day, that season, a lifetime. Specific time does not matter. Experience does. The painting moves from perception into object. What finally matters is not the image, but the response. The paintings are of neither place—not of Finland, not of Vermont. I think of them as the horizon—the threshold between two worlds.