The Greek folk painter Theophilos Chatzimichail (1870-1934) is one of the key influences behind my modern icon style. The main subjects of his works are Greek mythology, history and daily life. After his death he was given a retrospective at the Louvre In Paris. His painting ‘The Beautiful Adriana of Athens’ of a woman sitting under a cherry tree playing her guitar, inspired my painting. There are many visual layers, symbols and meanings to The Greek Australian because it is in dialogue with Theofilos’ painting. This was an act of respect to the artist as well as expressing my experience of living in the poetic space between two worlds that have always asked me to discover their synergy and harmony.

A woman with a second toe longer than her big toe (the proverbial Greek foot). She is sitting under a gum tree in a desert setting playing a Baglama. Two peacocks, mirror images, stand in the background; in Theofilos’s painting one stands in the foreground camouflaged. Gum Blossoms above her head echo the Southern Cross constellation. A small twig from an olive tree is on the ground in front of her; it was olive picking season in Melbourne the week I started painting. The earrings on her ears are similar to the ones I was wearing the day she got hers. The owl with her cloak of stars is connected to goddess Athena and the ancestral homeland.

Lines, dots and stars feature in my art, ripple effects of mosaics and ancient Greek pottery and perhaps less conscious reference to Indigenous Australian art.  They also belong to brushstrokes of Byzantine art and to the lines of a doodling youth compelled to make art as an act of belonging when school in Australia felt like a foreign land. 

*This artwork comes with an oak wood shadow box frame