The purpose of this blog is to shed some light into my (amateur and less than illustrious) painting career. I will show you some paintings of mine.
Note: the real paintings are much better, and what is shown here does not reveal the dimensions of the paintings.
THE EARLY DAYS
My painting career started when I was around 11 (1962), by copying, together with my father, the following Vincent Van Gogh painting:
THE COPY
THE ORIGINAL
Then we painted together this ship, named BREMEN. I do not have a pic of the original.
About a year later, when I was 12, I painted this ship alone (again, no pic of the original):
Then there was a painting of 4 Minoan fishermen that regrettably was lost (but see later).
Then there was this Clipper painting, probably the Cutty Sark, which I recently fished out. Date is unknown, but it was done probably when I was in high school, mid 60s. I had it in my room in my parents' house in Athens, and it was packed for the last 15 years or so.
THE MIT DAYS
When I was a graduate student at MIT, and just before I took my Doctoral exams (1976, age 25), I started copying the Claude Monet painting, "le train dans la neige".
But I did only 2/3 of the painting (the left hand side), and left the rest undone. I completed it 13 years later, when I had returned to Greece (1989, age 38).
COPY
ORIGINAL
THE NORDIC DAYS
There was a huge gap (31 years) between 1989 and 2020, when I resumed painting, in the middle of Covid. It was another Claude Monet painting, showing sunrise in the port of Le Havre. Age: 69.
COPY
ORIGINAL
Then, in 2021 (age: 70), I experimented with a number of paintings, mostly NOT copies, but I drew whatever came to my mind, in a quasi-random fashion.
The pic above is a free-lance copy of the following photo, which I took in 1963, when I was 12. The silhouette that you see is my father. The setting: sunset off cape Sounion, onboard SS Limnos, going to Sifnos. I took the photo with a Kodak Brownie, and apparently it was so good that it was published in EIKONES, a magazine. Big discussion on Facebook: is my father looking at me, or at the sea? I do not know the answer.
Then, here is some fish!
Painting a containership was a challenge. All lines parallel to the center-line of the ship converge to a point on the horizon. The name of the ship is SHANE.
Then we move into 2022, age 71. The one below is a random set of geometrical segments.
Then I decided to redo the Minoan fishermen that I did when I was a child and which were lost, this time three of them. They are three separate paintings.
The one below is kind of crazy,
The building in the one below is inspired by my house in Sifnos, however the colors and the background with the sea are different.
The one below is a liberal rendition of Kamares (Sifnos) from Agios Symeon.
The one below is inspired from Faros (Sifnos). This was done in 2023.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST!
The one below maybe is boring. The number of distinct colors is 17. This is, to date, my most recent painting, done in the fall of 2023.
Where are these paintings? Except the train and the clipper, which are in Athens, all are in Sifnos*. All Nordic paintings are acrylic, everything else is oil.
*The number of paintings in the Sifnos house is about 90. Except for the above, the rest was done by my father, who was a better painter than me, and far more prolific. There are many more paintings by him, in other places.
