NATURE IN GREECE AND MY ARTISTIC PERCEPTION OF IT
How I see this nature and how I feel it.
Born in the Kambos of Chios, Homer’s island, a rocky and volcanic island, austere and intense, with its ancient and venerable olive trees that thrust their fascinating and serpent-like roots into the ground with almond trees alternating with orange trees, the whole scenery being punctuated by the vertical lines of the dark-green cypresses with thistles springing up through the stones on the rocky slopes.
The Kambos, a vast sea of citrus orchards with its antique Genoese mansions and their flagstoned courtyards where imposing waterwheels supply cisterns flanked in their corners with high columns topped with a lush vegetation of climbing vines, rose trees and pomegranate trees dripping their branches into the water.
How I render this nature
I do not paint a landscape from life nor copy a spot or a view. I have an altogether different approach. After a long, intense observation, I single out a particular element I am interested in and that kindles my imagination and I compose around it. After several preparatory drawings and sketches, I paint a well-structured composition in which each element participates in the making of the painting as a whole in an energetic and passionate rhythm. I find nights most inspiring, wild, dark scary nights, often in the midst of earthquakes. When a little boy I had to muster up my courage and look after the crops and in such loneliness my imagination conjured up ghosts. Memories of a raging Aegean sea and dramatic storms also inspired several of my paintings.
The way I render Greek nature is therefore at odds with the traditional one, namely small white houses standing out against a blue sky and a calm, smooth sea. »