Artist Statement

I began my studies and practice in art 16 years ago, working in painting, drawing, and printmaking.

My practice started in training in a classical semi-academic manner, learning the traditional western approach towards drawing, painting, and visual perception, an approach which is regarded as the academic figurative movement. With time, study and work, I began to depart from those initial steps towards a new and main goal – developing new personal means of expression and new physical possibilities and harmonies.

For me, the entrance towards these goals passed through the landscape. I realized that for myself, as I identified in many of painters -whether discussing the Venetians, Cezanne, or the Abstract Expressionists – The physicality of the surrounding world and local environment could provide with the means essential for the development of new harmonies. Thus I began, along with my studio practice, to work in a continuous manner in the landscape near the Mediterranean on a daily-weekly basis for almost 8 years now, studying and embracing the unique light, colors, and physicality it had to offer me. This practice allowed and allows me to deal with elements which are considered by myself as the pillars of painting – space, light, colors, materiality, which then are infused into my practice and studio work together with other main sources of inspiration – music, the history of the visual arts, Greek mythology and others.

For me, music serves as inspiration in structure, in space, in movement within the painterly space, and in the dynamics between the elements in the work itself; corresponding and echoing one another while assembling a whole.

My love for the Aegean peninsula both in visual and in culture began years ago, and I carry it with me together with my deep connection and relation to the history of the visual arts from which I derive many subject matters which I relate to and find in the possibility of becoming vehicles of expression.

There are subject matters which I work with consistently over the years – portraits, self-portraits, the relationship between the painter and the studio/landscape/outside-world, bathers, landscape, Mythology, the female nude, and others. Lately, I also began working with more abstract compositions, though I would consider them to be as concrete as my more figurative works.

I work mostly on series on paper and on individual paintings in oil, where the physicality and means of expression keep evolving and change over time – as this is the main essence of art in my opinion – to keep changing, pushing, and developing new harmonies and discover new possibilities.