He painted Lappland. Andreas Alariesto recorded an unknown culture

WHEN you ask Lapp painter Andreas Alariesto about his art, he responds with his entire body. The azure eyes dart about alertly; his powerful hands start to twitch and turn, searching for words to illustrate. Then the stout shoulders come forward, bringing the answer very close to you. ``When I was a child,'' he quips in his fervent, friendly voice, ``my favorite place was under the table. It was an excellent spot for eavesdropping on grownups.'' Between the knees and toes of Lapp elders, young Andreas could overhear stories and myths of ancient times in the northern region of Finland - of reindeer-herding customs, wild animals, and shamans. These stirred up a vibrant slew of pictures in the boy's creative head, and it did not take long for him to do something with those images: ``When I was 3, I found a piece of wood and coal on the floor and drew a picture of a devil from a myth,'' he recalls. ``That's the first piece of art I remember making.'' The year was 1903.

Seventy-three years later, in 1976, Mr. Alariesto was still making pictures - colorfully naive paintings of traditional Lappish life and lore. He was a poor and neglected artist, a retired laborer who had made hundreds of drawings and paintings in his lifetime - and never managed to sell a single one.

Then, quite suddenly, Finland's publishing magnate, Hannu Tarmio, asked to see Alariesto's work. He decided immediately to make a book. Mr. Tarmio arranged for an exhibition in the prestigious Helsinki Art Hall to coincide with the publishing of Alariesto's work. ``People pressed into his room not only for his artwork,'' Tarmio says, ``but for his magical presence - the way he danced about and eagerly told the stories behind each of his paintings.''

Today Alariesto is Finland's prize folk hero, renowned as the storyteller of traditional Lappish life. He tells his tales with song as well as paintbrush, and is known for having an ethnographer's eye, a historian's memory, and a poet's imagination. His lively paintings have been displayed across Europe, and invitations for shows have come from as far away as Israel. Lappia House, the well known cultural museum in Finland's northern provincial capital city of Rovaneimi, boasts a permanent collection of 40 Alariesto works, valued at about $150,000.

Almost every Alariesto painting advertises the fact that this man has had no formal art training. The figures often look like toys, and frequently the perspective and lighting are off. But the pictures have an undeniable charm, and they trumpet the fact that their author intimately knows and revels in his subject. Each picture, accompanied by a text written by Alariesto, faithfully records a slice of Lappish cultural heritage - traditional building styles, means of subsistence, seasonal changes in the textures of the land.

Some paintings illustrate hair-raising Lapp legends, such as the tale of Alariesto's ancestor Akmeeli the shaman, who died 300 years ago when he sought eternal life by having himself buried alive.

Each painting seems perfect in its own right, emanating from such a sincerity of purpose that the notion of technical shortcomings seems beside the point. ``I never called myself an artist in the beginning,'' says Alariesto. ``I just always had a very, very strong will to save stories and life on pictures. So I painted and painted. For a long time people told me I was wasting my time; whenever I picked up my brush they would say, `Andreas is painting again, he is doing nothing.' Some have changed their minds.''

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