They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between the studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it.

They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

                                                (From “Videomania” in Fair Play)

Tove Jansson knew these empty spaces well. She came from a family of artists and, in addition to being a writer, was serious about her painting and illustration. She and her partner of more than forty years, visual artist Tuulikki Pietilä, spent winters in Helsinki and thirty years of summers alone together on the tiny island of Klovharun in an archipelago off the coast of Finland.