In the beginning I was a keen SLR photographer. Over the years I watched with interest as computers became more and more sophisticated, and was intrigued from my very first Mac Plus by the possibilities the new technology was opening up. I enjoyed playing around with the (now-primitive) Mac Plus graphics programmes.
I forget exactly how it happened, but, for one of the editions of Antipodes which I edited, I had no drawings from Nikos Kypraios and so I resorted to my Mac Plus and created drawings on it for the magazine. (See Antipodes no. 25/26, Dec. 1989.)
Over time the capabilities of computers grew until it became possible to go beyond crude line and dot drawings to full colour pictures, and photographs manipulated with such precision that the manipulation is undetectable. One could blend many photographs to create pictures of imaginary scenes, and integrate that with graphic-art creations, themselves often digital. This was a dream come true.
I coined the term “photo-graphics” for this new art form with its endless possibilities, and it is the field I work in, in addition to straight photography. My output ranges from photographs—sometimes digitally enhanced—to digitally created “paintings”, and everything in between.
Soula is an artist and designer based in Melbourne, Australia.
Soula has a great love for both design and the visual arts. Beginning her professional career as creative director of ooi.com.au, a design company she owns together with her husband Theo, Soula also had the opportunity to exhibit her fine art paintings and prints at various Melbourne galleries.
Soula explores different bodies of work through many mediums, initially beginning by sketching before progressing works in acrylics and oils, various printmaking forms and egg tempera where subject matter permits.
Through whimsical characters, building facades and/or streetscapes, Soula’s subjects reflect her cultural heritage, travel, and personal life experiences – one of which is living with chronic pain.
A sea change from Melbourne now sees Soula Co Directing Queenscliff Gallery (QG) with her husband Theo on the Bellarine Peninsula. Soula more broadly applies her fine art and design experience by curating exhibitions and managing QG’s brand and identity.
Soula is represented by QG, housed in an 1868 Wesleyan church space. Her work is available at both the QG and The Convent Daylesford.
I believe in the free minded artist who in spite manifestos allows for a journey to take place, unknown, fearful and lonely, driven by a stimulus, recounting memories of his experiences of sorrow, pains, fears, doubts, the conscious and subconscious together, facing the challenge of planning the means of colour, form, space, balance, crescendos, materials, to deliver the essence and the magical poetics.
I completed my Tertiary studies as a scholarship recipient, at the School of Fine Arts Athens Metsovio Polytechnio. I majored in Painting and Theatrical Set Design under the guidance of Yiannis Moralis , Dimitris Mitaras and Vassili Vassiliadis.
As a practising artist I exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, got involved in architectural public projects, theatrical performances , children book illustration as well as Art projects for children.
I’m an independent design professional (creative/graphic) – since 1979 – having worked for some of Australia’s best design studios and managing my own creative consultancies. I have always kept a low profile over the years. I was invited to establish an in-house creative, design and production centre for D&D Global Group in 2001 – one of Australia’s most innovative and progressive cross-media companies. We were successful two years running in winning the prestigious printing industries of America premier print awards – [Benjamin Franklin Award] for best of category for use of environmentally sound materials – Certificate of Merit for special innovation – Certificate of Merit for print and graphic arts self-promotion – and for the first time an Australian print company was awarded – “They said it couldn’t be done” award.
“Creativity is an expression of emotions released to help process moments of uncertainty, fear and joy”
Abstract and Geometric art allows me to evaluate the contrasts of life. This drives my passion. I’m a digital abstract designer and artist exploring my personal truths, and connecting to my inner thoughts and feelings, which relate back to my life experiences.
With a personal and professional commitment to visual expression, I create unique and immersive, abstract digital art.
Geometric Structures – lines, patterns, shapes, and forms, leads me to draw inspiration from my surrounding natural environment – it inspires me to study – the visual perception and power of colour – saturation, hues, lightness, and balance.
My art expresses, hope for the future – it captures an emotional feeling in an abstract contemporary style that creates freedom from reality and reflects originality with an inconsistent and unpredictable nature.
I explore shape, colour, form, function and composition which allows each person’s own experiences, views and vision to interpret my work in their own highly personal and unique way – “it is not a static image”.
Digital Geometric Abstract Artist Original Contemporary, Geometric Abstract Art Digital Fine Art + Wallpaper Murals
Anne Warren works in several different mediums including painting, drawing, collage and mixed media.
Her abstract paintings are responses to mood through several layers of paint with the final result emerging through erasure. This technique can have an element of planning with the final result emerging by chance.
The collage mixed media work dislocates found images into new and unexpected environments that can sometimes be described as plausible and at other times implausible.
Anne teaches workshops from her home studio.
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Distinction) 2009 Visual Art Diploma (2001)
Masonik is an Australian multi-disciplinary arts collective, who have performed, nationally and internationally since 2006.
Masonik’s immersive experience creates electronica / jazz-fusion / neo-classical and soundscapes layered with video projections. As Visual Artists, Masonik generates artworks based in graphic design, film, photography, sculpture, installation & theatre.
Masonik were regular contributors for the ABC Radio National show, ‘Sound Quality’ & were invited to record in the ABC studios in Sydney. Masonik has also created long form exhibitions and performances titled ‘Altar’d Lament’. These have been presented across Australia & Athens.
‘Altar’d Lament’ is a multi-disciplinary art installation and performance project. Though the critical locus of the project is the destruction of the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna in 1922, ‘Altar’d Lament’ is a pantheon for Neo-rebetes.
Masonik embarked on a pilgrimage to Piraeus and Athens to confront ‘rebetiko’, a cultural form that can be simultaneously fragile and resilient, both comforting and threatening. Refuge for the exiled, the tradition altered creating a narrative to an open-ended underworld. So was created this Unorthodox Amanes Altar.
Joy is a multi-disciplinary artist with works in puppetry, painting, ceramics, printmaking, digital imagery, and traditional icon painting. Her work explores the patterns, rhythms, and marks of nature in painted and printed forms and more recently from coffee cup ‘reading’ pattern imagery.
In her painted works, she abstracts the natural forms to a series of graphic units of strokes and lines. With these units she uses a technically simple form of printmaking and painting to build complex layers of colour, depth, and movement. Moving away from representing the natural world in natural pictorial form, she deconstructs imagery using repetition of marks to create moving surfaces of colour which allude to energy fields, wave systems and other unseen patterns within the natural world.
Joy (Economos) McDonald studied Fine Arts at Sydney University (1970s) and graduated at the Australian National University in Visual Arts in 1997 after teaching for several years in NSW. Now residing in Melbourne Joy has continued her art career in abstract imagery both digital and on canvas.
Her work is in several collections both overseas and in Australia, in the collection of the Canberra Museum and Gallery and in corporate collections. She spent time in Canberra on the Board of ANCA (Australian National Capital Artists) was a member of Craft ACT where she often exhibited as an APM, (Aust. Professional Member) her last solo there being in 2013.
She was a finalist in the Fleurieu Biennale SA in 2008, and again in three categories with two high commendations in 2011. She received a Rosalie Gascoigne Award from the Capital Arts Patrons Organization (CAPO) Canberra and a recipient of two grants from artsACT 2011 and 2012 for a Centenary puppet stage production and children’s book in 2013 titled, The Very Sad Fishlady, which was performed at THE STREET THEATRE. This story, and its subsequent production, was inspired by her Greek heritage with connections to Kastellorizo, in the Dodecanese Islands of Greece.
In her early artistic career, Joy began as a puppeteer with Peter Scriven’s Marionette Theatre, The Tintookies which toured Australia’s country towns. Here she worked with Michael Salmon, the well-known Melbourne children’s author. Joy has had over sixty exhibitions (ceramic, painting, and prints) and several solo exhibitions in Canberra and Sydney. She lives with her Husband James McDonald, PhD, who is an academic and a historian, specialising in Classical Greek and Canberra history.
Constantine Nicholas (HatziYiannakis) was born in Perth, Western Australia and currently lives in Sydney. He is a 3rd generation Greek Australian. His ancestry is from the isle of Kastellorizo where his grandparents and many others migrated in the early 1900s escaping foreign occupations, and seeking a new life in Australia. Most landed in Fremantle, and other parts of Australia and stayed. Nicholas has always questioned his identity which has been an ongoing theme in his work. He creates rich and layered works, installations and digital projects. His work offers fragments, of text and imagery, citing colonial, aboriginal and commercial references which the artist uses to question his Australian identity. “An ongoing theme in my work is to use historical journals (other’s truth), maps and illustrations to present a ‘point of view’.
His new line of work since 2020, harkens back to very early works, are more abstract and less referencial in nature. ART LINES explores space, digital photography and drawing to create rich coloured abstract line-scapes. Visit lynkfire.com/Artcons9
Nicholas has participated in more than 70 exhibitions in ANZ, APAC and USA. Represented in Public and Private Collections in AUS, NZ, APAC, US, EMEA.
‘A gesture in visual art is an expression of an idea or meaning which is presented and performed through the somatic effect on material and site. In other words, it is an expression of the body’s temporal rhythm, as well as a record of the body’s interaction and encounter with material and space.‘ Emmy Mavroidis
Born in 1965 in Melbourne, Emmy Mavroidis is a Master by Research candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne. Currently, she is conducting research focusing on Drawing: Gesture, the Body, and Movement. At the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, The University of Melbourne, she earned a Master’s in Contemporary Art in 2020. Following her completion of her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1986, she earned her Diploma in Education in 1992.
She founded Nyora Studio Gallery in 2003, a thriving arts centre in Melbourne. Emmy teaches & mentors other artists through the Nyora Gallery Resident Artists Program as well as holding exhibitions and workshops on drawing and sculpture.
2021-current Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts Master of Fine Art, by Research 2019-20 The University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts Fine Arts & Music, Master of Contemporary Art 2003 – current Nyora Studio Gallery Director, Melbourne 1991 The University of Melbourne, Institute of Education. Diploma of Education 1984–1986 Victorian College of the Arts Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting
SELECTED PRIZES AND AWARDS 2023 Artist in Residence at DRAWinternational Caylus, France 2022 Recipient of The University of Melbourne, Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship for excellence in drawing. 2020 Winner of the Arnold Bloch Leibler Award, Yering Station Sculpture Award, Yarra Glen, Victoria. 2020 Grant awarded, Nillumbik Shire Council. Time of COVID-19, Art and Cultural Development, 2019 Montalto Sculpture Prize, Finalist, Montalto Vineyard and Olive Grove, Red Hill, Victoria 2018 Lorne Sculpture Biennale Small Sculpture Prize, Finalist, Lorne, Victoria 2016 Winner, Yering Station Sculpture Award, Yering Staff & Directors Choice Award, Yarra Glenn, Victoria 2015 Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Finalist 2014 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize – Semi-finalist 2013 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize – Semi-finalist 1985 Clifton Pugh Drawing Prize, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Victoria 1985 The Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria Award, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Victoria
Born in Paphos, Cyprus. Living in Melbourne Australia, Barbara’s art practice is an emotive, intellectual, and philosophical investigation of life and place in the modern world. Exploring her inner consciousness and how it interacts with her external surroundings. There is a constant push-pull effect of anarchy and control. The aim is to find balance within the chaos of these two spaces and discover what results. An ongoing theme within the artist’s practice is the study of the human condition. Examining our value system as a society and on a personal level. The use of colour is a critical part of her dialogue analysis. Engaging in an unspoken language through a spectrum of colours, form, scale, materials, and physical space.
Barbara has exhibited in Australia, Hong Kong, London. Her artworks are held in both private and public collections throughout Australia, Asia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America.
