By @JustinWetch
Miss Finland
When Jenni Pasanen was fifteen, she walked into an art school admissions test in Finland and built a paper sculpture of a tsunami. She knew exactly what she was doing. Then she sat down to wait for her interview, and something snapped.
"If I do this as my job now, then I kind of give up myself."
When the interviewers asked if she wanted to be there, she said no. Then she walked out.
It sounds reckless. It was the opposite. She'd realized that art was too important to hand over. "The art is something that is so important for me that I am not willing to give it to someone else to control," she says. So she chose graphic design instead, a field she could learn from without surrendering the thing she cared about most. She would keep art as her own, on her own timeline, and approach it when she was ready.
Before any of this, her first career ambition had been to become Miss Finland. She laughs about it now. "That was the first thing I thought as a child, but then when you realize what a job means and what that thing is, then I was like, okay, I want to be an artist one day."
Nature Is Science
Jenni grew up in Finland spending most of her time outside. Climbing trees, doing gymnastics, drawing, painting with watercolors, building things. She taught herself piano because her sister played. Once a week she attended a hobby art school, three hours of clay and pulp and painting and light and texture, a slow, broad education in making things with your hands.
Then the computer arrived, and she went entirely inside.
Nature stayed with her. She still draws from it constantly, from the microscopic to the cosmic. "Everything we live, I see beauty in it," she says. But the other thread was science. She grew up reading everything she could get her hands on: biology, anatomy, astrology, nature books, horror novels from the library. Whatever was fun to learn. She stopped believing in anything supernatural at nine years old. "I have not even one religious bone in my body," she says. "Everything is based on the science and math."
This matters because of what her work looks like. Jenni Pasanen makes some of the softest, most ethereal imagery in digital art: dreamlike worlds, smoky atmosphere, faceless figures drifting through light. The fact that the mind behind all that softness runs on pure empiricism is the central contradiction, and she doesn't experience it as a contradiction at all. Nature is science. Science is beauty. The dreamlike quality is just what beauty looks like when you layer it enough times.
Nine years of silence
She studied graphic design for eight years total, lower and higher education, and worked five more in offices doing branding and animation. Thirteen years. She loved the branding side because you're building someone else's story, and she understood the distinction between design and art with unusual clarity. "When I do design for people, I see it as a service," she says. "You bring the customer's vision alive, you understand their mission and their message." Art is something else entirely. "Art for me is my expression. It reflects who I am."
The whole time, she made art on the side. But here's the part that separates her from almost every other artist in this series: she pulled all of her digital work off the internet for roughly nine years. No Instagram, no portfolio, no audience. She wanted to create without the influence of the outside world.
"If I take influence in, it's not me who is creating," she says. "I'm taking their influence in my work, and I didn't want that."
Nine years of building in total privacy, shaping a voice that belonged to nobody else. The fifteen-year-old who walked out of art school to protect something was still protecting it, with the patience to wait nearly a decade before showing anyone what she'd made.
Real but unreal
Jenni's figures have no faces. She made a deliberate decision to remove the thing we read first, the human face, and force viewers to look elsewhere. "If you remove the face, then you start to look around the work a different way," she says. "You have no focus point or something you can read the emotion straight away." The mystery was the point. Without a face, the viewer has to find emotion in the body, the light, the composition.
The smoky quality of her work comes partly from her layering process and partly, she admits laughing, from the fact that she needs glasses and doesn't wear them. "I just don't see, and it's smoky, so it becomes more smoky than it should be."
Her process is a layered cake. She paints in Photoshop, stacking textures, photography, hand-drawn elements, and AI-generated layers on top of each other. The AI component comes in two forms. The first is Artbreeder, a GAN tool she has used since 2018 to generate abstract textures. The second is a custom diffusion model she built with Huemin and No Usr, trained entirely on her own body of work. She uses it mainly for textures and the transitions between layers. She fell in love with it because the outputs felt like something she'd never seen before: "making something that is real, but it's unreal, and it doesn't really look like something while it looks like something." She uses those textures as raw material, painting over and through them, pulling the results back and forth between generation and hand. The final step is always color grading, which she describes as pulling buried colors back to the surface, recovering what got smudged together in the process.
Her Time Eclipse series grew out of a long obsession with time. One painting she often comes back to when explaining it is Giacomo Balla's futurist image of a dog on a leash, the one where the dog has multiple legs and the leash waves in frozen motion. It showed her something about what painting can do that a photograph cannot. "You don't have to actually paint what you are seeing right now," she realized. "You can paint the past, now, and future at the same time, because everything is possible in the painting."
Sweating hands
When on-chain art arrived, Jenni saw it immediately: the first time ever that digital artists could monetize work in its native digital form. She quit her job, but it was nothing like a snap decision. It was something she had been waiting for for years. On-chain art finally made it possible to approach digital work in its native form, and she knew that if she didn't go, she would regret it forever.
But before any of that came the harder moment. After nine years offline, she published her work on Instagram. Her hands were sweating. She was shaking when she clicked the button.
"It's a big leap for the artist to show themselves to the world, who they are, as they are."
The first person to notice was Chikai, who sent her a message on Twitter saying he loved the work and to keep going.
The anti-AI backlash of 2022 brought hate comments about her use of GAN textures. Her response was characteristic: listen, understand the fear, reply without anger. Most people came around once they understood what she was actually doing. "The key to everything and all the conversation is the listening and understanding," she says.
Ask questions
When I ask what she wishes people understood, Jenni tells a story. She once saw a photograph on Instagram of a person sitting calmly on a porch. Nothing happening. Peaceful image. Then she learned the story behind it.
"I was traumatized for two years because it was the most heartbreaking and the most horrible stories I have ever heard, even though the picture is calm."
Her point is simple: ask questions. What's behind the surface can change everything. Each of her pieces carries different stories and different meanings, and they only open if you're willing to look past the smoky dreamlike exterior. The girl who protected her art by walking away from an interview is still protecting it, and now she is inviting you in. The moment she releases a piece, it belongs to everyone who sees it. She thinks of it as two side mirrors: every artwork is a different work depending on who is looking, a combination of the creator and the viewer with every glance. The only thing she protects is her own story. "If I do then I no longer belong in my art," she says, "and become futile as anyone can replace me."
The Wrap
Jenni shouts out @lifeofc, the first person who ever noticed her work and told her to keep going. @shashxg, her biggest collector, who has been a constant support and collaborator in building the space. And @Punk4725, a longtime collector and friend.
Artists inspiring her lately: @ArtPetio, whose bird animations she fell in love with ("I love birds, I love animation and birds"), Sean Layh (sean_layh_artist on Instagram), and @miralencis.
For future Weekly Dose episodes, Jenni recommends @kior_____, @Sko_hr, and @oelhan_tv.