Pavlos Andronikos

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.

Past exhibitions

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Soula Mantalvanos

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.

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Tina Sideris

CALL

Love of the visual arts especially colour and pattern, inspired by both ethereal and earthly beauty has always captivated me.

My yearning to interpret the external world and my internal world , through the visual medium, is what gives me joy. It also helps me make sense of life’s journey. By drawing on my life, including my upbringing (family), my schooling, my travels, my daughters and husband, I am never at a loss for inspiration, for subject matter. It is also these very relationships and experiences that drive my desire to visually capture those reflections.

Thematically I take inspiration from these influences and the myths and legends of my heritage. Here I draw on the power and allure of the ancient goddesses and see these elements in all women today: by reflecting on the past, my art keeps me firmly rooted in the present.

My love of Matisse’s odalisques, religious iconography and Japanese woodblocks have all inspired how I approach my subject matter. Their serenity and stillness in a moment of contemplation and reflection (however fleeting that moment is). I like how they capture the transcendental in the ordinary.

The artform of pyrography allows me to celebrate a simple decorative style, letting the lines and colours work alongside the natural surface of the wood (something of the earth and so earthly) to tranquilly co-exist. I enjoy the interchange between materials and techniques, including, the egg tempera technique and the gilded glass technique of ‘verre eglomise’ that was predominant during the Renaissance period. My studio practice is continually evolving and I enjoyed my most recent intersection between the manual and digital mediums. The product a hybrid of analogue and digital montages, that so closely paralleled our world as we are living it today.

My art is simultaneously decorative, serene, sensual and grounded.

My plans are to extend my subject matter further into the realms of the imagination and to organically allow the interchange between materials and techniques and to allow myself to escape in the process and learn from where this journey takes me. Every stage illuminating the way. I find beauty and mystery in all aspects of life and that is why I pursue this enigmatic path and build on the mystery of storytelling.

  • Monash University Bachelor of Arts 1985
  • Monash University Diploma of Education 1986
  • Monash University Bachelor of Arts (Graphic Design) 1992
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Masonik Arts

CALL

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.

Masonik: Perth-based innovators of multidisciplinary arts, The Greek Herald, 9 June 2023

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Efrossini Chaniotis

I am a Sculptor and Painter with a passion for story telling through art with a focus on themes that are inspired by my Hellenic heritage and modern art.

I have expertise in Painting, Sculpture, Street Art and Murals, Installation, Performance Art and Graphic Design. My training in Art Therapy and role as a co-founder of the Melbourne Art Therapy Studio, provided me with additional skills in the therapeutic application of the visual arts in both clinical and private, individual and group settings.

Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts /South Australian School of Art, Australia
Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts/ Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece
Erasmus Scholarship/Madrid School of Fine Arts, Spain
Master of Art Therapy/ La Trobe University, Melbourne

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Jenny Dumont

Jenny Dumont has travelled to many countries over the years to paint and view the work of past and present masters. She worked as an artist and teacher during her time living in Greece, Canada and since 2008 in her Bayside art studio in Melbourne Australia. Originally trained in Graphic Design but greatly inspired by the Surrealist movement with artists such as Dali, Man Ray and Duchamp. She went on to blend and create works that explore several different mediums and styles from modern acrylics and traditional oils to abstract inks and resins.

Her journey with resin as an art medium began in 2014 with works executed on custom made round boards and canvas. Inspiration came mainly from nature especially flowers, the beautiful local Bayside beaches, and the landscape of this earth in general. She mixes inks, pigments and powders with clear resin which is then poured in layers to create a composition that is fluid, has depth and is rich in colour and visual texture.

Jenny’s artist journey reflects her love of Surrealist ideals of juxtaposing images, mediums and methods. These attributes are an influence on her style and belief that, ‘not all needs to be as we know it’. Whilst working with and teaching resin, she began experimenting with the creation of art through furniture. Leaning on her experience as a wood and metal craft teacher, her love of art and mixing mediums, Jenny sourced home furnishings with unique architecture and their potential for metamorphosis. Each piece is lovingly restored, reinvented, and adorned with a piece of resin art, one of a kind and unique to that piece.

Today, Jenny is a full-time artist, Secondary teacher and entrepreneur. She continues to work with mixed media, experimenting with the vast boundaries this medium has to offer. She stands by the belief that, ‘an artist should not be branded but be a conduit, a forever evolving fluid medium’. Private collections of her work are held in Greece, Singapore, Canada, United Kingdom and Brazil.

Exhibitions:

  • 1999 Pylaia Art Gallery Greece
  • 2003 Matticks Farm Art Gallery Canada
  • 2004 Vancouver Island Food and Wine Festival
  • 2009 Canterbury Art Show Melbourne
  • 2010 Beaumaris Art Group2014 Art for Life
  • 2013-2021 Bluethumb Art Gallery
  • 2015 Antipodean Palette Steps Gallery Carlton
  • 2015 The Bayside Art Show
  • 2015 Mingara Art Gallery Phillip Island
  • 2015 Emerging Art Gallery Windsor
  • 2015-2016 Without Pier Gallery Bayside
  • 2017 Beaumaris Art & Craft Exhibition
  • 2015 November issue of Inside Out Magazine
  • Bachelor of Education in Art and Design, Melbourne University (1985-1989)
  • Secondary Art and Design teacher, Arts coordinator, State examiner and mentor for VCE art students (1990-1992)
  • Professional exhibiting artist and teacher (1993-current)
  • Co-founder of Steaming Ink Design Partnership (advertising, graphic design and photography)
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James Raftopoulos

James Raftopoulos is a Melbourne based Graphic Designer and Artist. Through abstract mark-making, rudimentary printing techniques and digital compositions and motion, James explores the fuzzier edges of what outlines the human experience. James has exhibited work in group shows across Melbourne, culminating in his first regional solo show ‘Alive/Opaque’ in 2018.

Project Links

Gertrude Street Projection Festival

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Constantinos Emmanuelle

CALL

Constantinos (Costas) Emmanuelle is currently the Lead Teacher for the Visual Arts Department at Melbourne Polytechnic in Melbourne, Australia. As a practising artist, Costas has explored and investigated his cultural heritage through disciplines such as, illustration, photography, drawing, painting, graphic design and digital imaging.

Costas’ most ambitious creative journey so far has been a personal crusade to document the living memories of his parent’s generation in a cultural arts project called ‘Tales of Cyprus’. This multi-disciplinary art project explores his parent’s homeland of Cyprus and its culture and traditional way of life prior to the 1950’s. In this project Costas’ also documents stories of migration and new beginnings as many of his target subjects left Cyprus in the 1940s, 50s and 60s to resettled and start new lives in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States of America.

Costas’ first exhibition for Tales of Cyprus took place at the Chapel off Chapel gallery in Prahran (Melbourne) in 2014. The exhibition included original drawings, paintings and photography. Large panels displayed reproductions of rare old family photos with various quotations and translations derived from personal interviews Costas conducted with members of the Cypriot diaspora. The topic of displacement, migration and cultural identity was also explored in the exhibition.

More recently, Costas has written, designed and self-published a hard-bound book titled “Tales of Cyprus: A tribute to a bygone era.” The book contains the living memories and life stories of over forty elderly Cypriots who were born and lived in Cyprus during the first half of the 20th Century. Costas had spent seven years interviewing and documenting the living memories of elderly Cypriots from the Cypriot diaspora in Australia and other parts of the world. The book, written in English is therefore a recollection of a way of life that has all but disappeared.

  • 2014 – TAE40110 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (NMIT – Melbourne)
  • 2010 – Diploma of Vocational Education and Training (Vet) Practice (NMIT)
  • 2006 – Graduate Diploma of Education: Applied Learning (Deakin Uni – Melbourne)
  • 1995 – Bachelor of Arts in Education – Tertiary Education (Curtin Uni – Perth)
  • 1982 – Diploma of Arts / Graphic Design (Phillip Insitute – Melbourne)

To view more of Costa’s work please visit www.talesofcyprus.com.

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Nicholas Alexander Moraitis

Born in Africa, I learned the skills of photography in a shop in Addis Ababa for a period of 5 years. I developed black and white and colour negatives, as well as the printing and development of slides, reattaching negatives and colourizing photographs with oil transparent paints. I migrated to Australia 50 years ago and studied digital painting and website production at TAFE.

Digital painting is something I love and have learnt using computers, digital photography and colour. 3D Photography is and has been a hobby for many years.

I am the editor of the Anagnostis e-Magazine which promotes Greek Australian writers and poets, artists, photographers, movie/film makers throughout Australia.

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