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.
In memory of Stella, 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 Stella Tsirka be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).
Stella was born in the old city of Athens. From a young age she showed talent in music and art. After completing high school education she attended music lessons at the University of Athens. She is a self-taught artist and has been practicing her painting for more than 20 years. Her technique, although simple in execution, is quite effective in describing feelings and highly charged emotional states. In many of the compositions one can see surreal elements as if coming straight from her subconscious to dominate an otherwise quite logical landscape. There seems to be an on-going struggle between logic and the subconscious, between what one expects to see and what appears in a landscape. Stella’s is a very personal style, derived from her own life experiences and her desire to express feelings which lie too deep for words. In landscape and portrait painting Stella found the perfect medium of artistic expression.
Στέλλα Τσίρκα
Γεννήθηκα στην αρχαία Αθήνα. Μετά τη μεσαία εκπαίδευση, φοίτησα στο πανεπιστήμιο μουσικής στη σχολή μονωδίας της όπερας της Αθήνας. Από μικρό παιδί έδειξα ταλέντο στη μουσική και ζωγραφική. Με την ζωγραφική ασχολήθηκα περίπου είκοσι χρόνια. Αγαπάω τον υπερρεαλισμό. Τα χρώματα μου είναι από μαγεία των αγριολουλουδιών και του ουράνιου τόξου. Έχω προσθέσει επί πλέον μαύρο και καφέ σε διάφορους συνδυασμούς. Η σκιτσογραφία μου πηγάζει από το υποσυνείδητο με αντιμέτωπους την λογική να διαμαρτύρεται αλλά η σκέψη μου το παρουσιάζει έξω να το γράψω, έτσι το βλέπω
Georgia Tsarouhas is a self-taught artist who has been painting for several years from her home studio in Melbourne, Australia.
Born a Greek-Australian, she spent many of her formative years living in Australia and Greece for significant periods of time, and her psyche has been indelibly imbued by her life’s experiences being intertwined with these two incredible cultures and rich landscapes.
In her work she delves deeply to create significant visual experiences, usually drawing on personal undercurrents, linking themes of memory, heritage, internal language, time, and being—with internal and external landscapes. She takes note of the fragile wefts and warps of the human condition and combines these with inspiration from nature—weaving in the intangible, the in-betweenness of things, of love and loss, solace and yearning, beginning and end, holding on and letting go, fear and euphoria, the organic and static, light and dark, the process of metamorphosis and transition, making the invisible visible. As she engages with spontaneous yet conscious gestural expressions of color, marks, and abstraction, the composition that emerges on the canvas is one that conveys the emotional imagery she experiences through this layered contemplation.
Georgia paints large-scale as a way to find an expansive expression for what is ultimately an intimate connection with her own metaphysical alchemy. This endeavour nourishes her like a meditation and is what makes the process of painting both alluring and intriguing for her. Above all, her paintings are about resonance and connection. Georgia states: “My paintings are visceral visionary landscapes that resonate with an emotional response to memory and experience of being and place, via abstractions of color and the velvety lusciousness of oil on a large-scale canvas.”
Georgia’s paintings are held in private collections in Australia and overseas.
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.
Thalia put her career and love of art on hold to raise her family, but now she pursues her true passion as an expressionist artist.
Most of her work is inspired by nature- landscapes, seascapes and underwater life. ‘Beauty is hidden in the colours, textures and shapes found in our natural surrounds, parks, mountains and forever-flowing seas’. She hopes people view her work as both vibrant and exciting with the colours, textures and strokes applied, reflecting the depth, meaning and unique quality of each of her paintings.
Thalia has a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting), is both a long serving committee member of the Greek Australian Cultural League and member of C.A.S (Contemporary Art Society, Victoria).
Troy Argyros is a third generation Greek Australian born in Melbourne, 1990 and grew up in a multigenerational household.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Monash University, and has spent several years studying classical drawing and painting at The Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy.
Troy focuses on the beauty of light across the genres of portraiture, still life, and landscape.
He has held six solo exhibitions in Melbourne, was the recipient of The Graeme Hildebrand Emerging Artist Award in 2017 for Oil Painting and his work is featured in numerous private collections internationally.
2017-2020 The Florence Academy of Art Painting Program 2013 Graduate Diploma of Visual Art Education Monash University 2010-2012 Bachelor of Fine Art Monash University 2009 Certificate IV Visual Art and Contemporary Craft Holmesglen TAFE
