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

Yanis

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

Yanis
creative artist

Masonik Arts

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

Joy (Economos) McDonald

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.

Michael Christofas

Michael Christofas is a photographer who was born and raised in Melbourne. His passion for photography initially stemmed from a young age when he holidayed to various parts of Australia and around the globe with his parents, brother and sister. Once old enough to venture out on his own, he used travel as a means to experience different cultures and to immerse himself in the sights and sounds of these environments. Reflecting back, Michael believes this was his grounding into being able to connect with people, listen to their stories regardless of language barriers and be able to gain trust to capture visually expressive portraits.

Michael’s professional photographic journey started to take shape when he returned to tertiary education and graduated in 2007 with an Advanced Diploma in Photography. During his 4 years at the renowned Photography Studies College, Michael was able gain insight and skill in analogue (film) photography, Black & White Printing as well as Digital Photography.

As a visual artist, his love for people based photography has seen him gravitate more and more towards environmental portraiture. He gains inspiration by understanding, listening and engaging with each person he photographs. Michael’s images are raw and emotive and shows a true connection between artist and subject. His portraits can often reveal an alternate character that highlights identity and honesty.

Michael has worked as a freelance commercial photographer for fifteen years. His work is used in advertising, media, marketing collateral and websites. He is hired to capture images by not for profit & community organisations, as well as business groups & individuals from various sectors and industries.

He also designs and delivers training around photography. Whether it be camera operation and techniques, photo retouching or Photography for Wellness, Michael has facilitated workshops across many groups and levels.

Michael’s Persona project was recently honoured by the Governor General

Constantine Nicholas

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.

Antonios Baxevanidis

Antonios Baxevanidis was born in Likostomo Pellas on the 15 May 1944 as the civil war was ravaging Greece. He was two weeks old when his parents returned to Thessaloniki. He attended the technical school of electrical engineering in Thessaloniki and was also a keen cyclist and basketball player. He served in the Greek army for two years.

In 1968 he migrated to Australia and his love for theatre and cinema led him to study the Stanislavski method of acting with Shayna Hevron. He also studied at Crawford productions film school and went on to his first acting role with the Malvern Theatre Co. playing Mr Apopolos in “My Sister Eileen”. He attended theatre workshops at the Melbourne Actors Lab with Peter Kalos.

He also worked as a freelance photojournalist and he is a member of AJA well known for his photograph of Nelson Mandela which was published by Kodak.

Film credits include Kostas (1979) by Paul Cox, Malcolm (1986) by Nadia Tass, The Young Wife (1984) ABC series, The Keepers (1984) ABC, Dougherty SBS, Flowers of Rethymnon by John Tatoulis SBS, Prisoner: Cell Block H (1979), Eisai to tairi mou! (2001) Greek television series. He also appeared in Acropolis Now (1989), 10 Easy Steps (2014) with Louis Mandylor from My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), It’s a Date (2013)ABC and Dream Of a Shadow, a Greek Australian production.

Antonios is a member of the Actors Equity of Australia MEAA and has taken part in over 50 short films, and numerous commercials.

Theatre credits include: The Respectful Prostitute, The Shifting Heart, Zoo Story , Scapino, Pluto by Aristophanes directed by Michael Nikoloudis from the Northern Theatre of Greece, Salonica Bound at La Mamma theatre by Tom Petsinis, directed by David Myles, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest HST Theatre directed by David Myles.

Antonios has also taken part in over 12 music videos. His recent success was in the music video of Tones and I: Dance Monkey (2019) that has over 1.8 billion million views.

Antonios Baxevanidis Filmography

Constantinos Emmanuelle

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.

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.