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.
“In memory of Vlase, whose work had a profound effect on the cultural life of the Greek Community of Melbourne, with the request that the following excerpt and images about the life and work of Vlase Zanalis be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).”
Vlase Zanalis was born on the Greek island of Castellorizo in 1902 and migrated to Western Australia in 1914. He would gain national acclaim in 1934 for his “The Birth of a Nation”, but it was his work after 1948 on the Australian landscape and Indigenous themes that dominated his life paintings.
Zanalis’ contribution to the Greek dimension of Australian culture may be partly seen in the iconography of churches across the country. For many Greek Australians it is for his iconography in Greek Orthodox churches in Queensland, NSW and Western Australia that he is best known. Beyond the religious paintings, however, Zanalis captured in sweeping landscapes the contrasting red soils and white trees of the Pilbara, the rugged grandeur of Central Australia and the unique character of the Kimberley.
Midway through his career, Zanalis began a relationship with Aboriginal culture, which dominated his art for the last twenty years of his life. He became one of the first non-Aboriginal artists to value Indigenous Australians and their culture. Vlase Zanalis died in 1973 and was cremated at Perth’s Karrakatta Cemetery, WA.
Vlase (Palassi) Zanalis – a snippet about his artwork and indigenous Australians by Dr John N Yiannakis OAM
These included works of the Kimberley – where he had spent eight months in 1948 camping at Derby, Cockatoo Island, Yampi Peninsula, the King Leopold Ranges and Fitzroy Crossing – and the Northwest as well as his first Aboriginal subjects, painted at Forrest River Mission in the east Kimberley. The visit to Forrest River Mission in 1949 was the artist’s first contact with traditional/remote Aborigines and their art and began a twenty-year fascination with Aboriginal themes for Zanalis.
The subjects of his outback and Aboriginal art were drawn from the fringe-life of Darwin, from visits to Kimberley cattle stations and three Western Australian missions: Forrest River Anglican Mission, west of Wyndham, Mowunjum, a Presbyterian Mission on the outskirts of Derby and Jigalong in the Western Desert which was administered by the Apostolic Church.
Baobab trees, or boabs, feature in several of his Kimberley paintings. The ancient boab at Dadaway lagoon, near the Forrest River Mission village appeared, in at least two paintings. Zanalis knew of the historical significance of the tree. He had been told that the first pastoralists venturing into the area built a slab stone homestead near the tree in 1887. He was shown the cross, carved into the trunk that marked the grave of the first white child born in the east Kimberley.
He is allegedly the first non-aboriginal artist to see the spiritual significance of icons in Aboriginal belief and his Aboriginal portraits form a unique collection in Australian art. Zanalis’ Orthodox background and commissioned iconography from an earlier time gave him a sense of understanding and appreciation of the spiritual depth of traditional Aboriginal wall painting. He had a fascination with the icons Aborigines painted on sheltered cliff walls ten kilometres from Forrest River Mission. But when he applied these to his art, he was not always true to the original.
One painting shows men before a wall decorated with icons that are mostly from Zanalis’ imagination. Much of the wall art, though ‘aboriginal’ in appearance, is too carefully arranged and not true to the original.
Zanalis saw the indigenous Australians as a proud and dignified people and imposed elements of classical Greek culture on his portrayal of them. In several his paintings their stance and appearance are reminiscent of ancient Greek statues of the Olympian gods.
Here’s part of Zanalis’ own reflections on his outback artwork when, in 1967, he wrote to the Assistant Commissioner for Taxation explaining his Aboriginal Memorial Collection comprising 88 paintings:
“Since retiring and receiving my pension I have devoted my time to the study of the life and customs of the Aborigines. Within the last two years I have had two expeditions into the Western Desert. My intention is to record the life of this fast vanishing race, and I happen to be the only artist in the Commonwealth who has penetrated into their life and secret ceremonies.”
The Literary Journal of the “Greek Cultural League”, in 1988, citing an unnamed art critic of The West Australian, said of Zanalis:
“With the death of Vlase Zanalis [1973], the northern Aborigines have lost a true friend, and Australia one of the most dedicated and sincere artists; a man able to get to the inner truth of a subject and put it on canvas. He was a pioneer of the north and of Australian art and his endurance and dedication were in the best European tradition.”
Noted historians, Dr John Yiannakis and Dr Neville Green, reasearched the life of Zanalis and produced a publication entitled, ‘Vlase Zanalis: A Greek Australian Artist’ (LaTrobe University, 2003).
Professor George Kanarakis also wrote a chapter about the artist in his book, ‘In the Wake of Odysseus: Portraits of Greek Settlers in Australia’ (1997).
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
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.
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
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)
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.
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)
