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.
In memory of Peter, 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 Peter Tsitas be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).
A deep interest in the environment and how people respond to place is at the core of Peter Tsitas’ work – as an architect and town planner, and an artist and photographer. At first glance, the sleepy coastal fishing village of Warneet, at the head of Western Port Bay, has little in common with the island country of Cuba in the Caribbean. Yet Peter’s response to both reveal an eye trained to look at where and how we live.
While Warneet and Cuba are very different, both are places that have been left relatively untouched by progress. Warneet is quiet, a recreational fishing village surrounded by wetlands fringing Western Port that are internationally protected for the large number of native birds, animals and plants. Peter has been visiting regularly for 30 years and has captured the surroundings in a variety of media in that time.
Whether photographing, drawing, using pen and ink or pastels, the isolated beauty, ebbing tides and wide-open sky has proved a restorative and ongoing fascination for the artist. Not much happens at Warneet except for the tide going in and out, the fishermen standing preoccupied and silent on the pier and the ubiquitous boats sailing the inlet and bay. The mangroves, which are very forceful as they try to assert their dominance, have proved another enduring interest for Peter.
In 2005, Peter travelled to Cuba and based a major photographic series on his experience (Cuba Now! Steps Gallery 2006). These drawings in oil pastel explore habitat and while they contain no people, the presence of the local community seeps through. As a town planner, Peter appreciated the human scale of Cuba’s cities and towns, and the repetition of stylistic elements in the architecture. While Warneet is about nature, Cuba is about how people live; Peter was fascinated by the tight lanes and the constant element of surprise. “You’d walk around a corner, hear singing and all of a sudden you are at a café with live music, people coming together to share food and have fun. The sense of belonging is paramount.
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.
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.
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.
For over last four decades, Effy has been documenting the historical and contemporary presence of Greek-Australians both here and overseas, in partnership with historian Leonard Janiszewski. She is publicly recognised as ‘the photographer who popularised Greek-Australian history’ and is acclaimed as one of Australia’s leading socio-cultural documentary and portrait photographers. Renowned for her intimate and sensitive portrait presentations, she is considered a pioneer in debunking Greek-Australian stereotypes and presenting the complex personal, diverse and evolving faces, lifestyles and occupations of Greek Australians, across generations. Effy’s images are held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian Embassy in Athens. Effy has curated and co-curated various fine art, photographic and sociocultural exhibitions, together with sociocultural installations. Major cultural spaces around the country have exhibited her work. Effy has also exhibited internationally. Her two most significant exhibitions have been the ‘In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians’ (this is also the title to their ongoing national archive project) and ‘Selling an American Dream: Australia’s Greek Café’ that was launched at the National Museum of Australia in 2008. With Leonard, they have produced four major books; three extensive exhibition catalogues; more than 250 book chapters, articles or conference papers; and three film documentaries. In 2022 Effy was recognised as a ‘Woman of Influence’ by the Hellenic Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (HACCI) for her photographic documentary work spanning 40 years. In early 2023 Effy’s work was published in a new book, ‘Forty Photographs, A Year at a Time’ where she selected one contemporary image from her vast archive to represent each year since 1982 to the present in order to reveal the changing face of Greek-Australians. In late 2023 she will be releasing her latest book, ‘The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios’ Soup Kitchen’ where since early 2021 she has been documenting the work of Father Nektarios, a Greek Orthodox priest who with his many volunteers have been providing a soup kitchen from the church hall at Sts Constantine and Helen Church in the inner-west suburb of Newtown.
BA, from Sydney University, in 1980, majoring in Fine Arts and Archaeology
Diploma in Education (Secondary – Art), Sydney Teachers’ College, 1981
Post-Graduate Diploma in Professional Art Studies (Photography), from Sydney’s City Art Institute, 1983
Christina Heristanidis is an award winning filmmaker. Her films have screened on national television, at film festivals and in art galleries, including the NGV. She has a degree in Fashion Design from RMIT University (1984) as well as a degree in Media Arts (1996), also from RMIT University. She followed these up with a Graduate Diploma in Film and Television from the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne University). She has taught in both the School of Fashion & Textiles and the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. In 2000 Christina wrote, directed and co-produced her film Dear Bert which won The United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award for promotion of Multicultural issues. She has been on the selection panel for short documentaries at The Melbourne International Film Festival from 2003 till 2018 inclusive.
Graduate Diploma (Film and Television) Victorian College of the Arts. At The University of Melbourne (completed 1997)
Bachelor of Arts (Media) RMIT University (completed 1996)
Bachelor of Arts (Fashion) RMIT University (completed 1984)
Past projects, exhibitions and awards
2020: We The Makers Create. National Wool Museum Geelong Public Gallery
2019: Liminal State – a digitally projected exhibition of lost, forgotten and abandoned clothing as part of VAMFF
2012: L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, cultural program event. Hand Eye Collective, hosts a series of discussion around current issues and ideas of major importance in fashion design thinking today
2012-Present: Founding member of The Hand Eye Collective
1999-2018: On the selection panel for short documentary film for Melbourne International film Festival (one year off to have a child)
2001: Winner of The United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award, for Promotion of Multicultural Issues
1998: Winner of Dox Direct- Cinemedia and SBS Independent Accord Competition
1998: Judge for The Melbourne International Film Festival
“In memory of Christella, 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 Christella Demetriou be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).”
Media Press Release
Run and Fly, Monster Tooth!* A posthumous exhibition of paintings by artist Christella Demetriou
1st – 30th May 2019 Darebin Arts Centre, cnr Bell St & St Georges Rd, Preston, Vic. 3072
A posthumous exhibition by Christella Demetriou, Run and Fly, Monster Tooth!, will premiere at the Darebin Arts Centre on Wednesday, 1st May. The retrospective will feature a selection of works spanning Demetriou’s career as well as artefacts celebrating her diverse and multi-layered creative life. Esther Anatolitis, Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, will open the exhibition. Commissioner, Rosaria Zarro will represent the Victorian Multicultural Commission. Artist & curator, chair of arts Mildura board, founder of museum of innocence Mildura, Domenico De Clario, & poet Andrea Demetriou (The Inconsolable Clock) will speak about her work.
Christella Demetriou was an artistic polyglot. She not only excelled as a painter, but was also a composer, a classic instrumentalist of the bouzouki, an unknown poet and an athlete. A refugee from what is now occupied Cyprus, Christella and her family migrated to Australia in 1976. She exhibited widely and performed in both Australia and Greece.
As a painter Christella was an artistic cryptographer, she used abstraction to hide within her paintings everything she could not endure, everything she could not face. She paints her feelings, her despair at the elusiveness and the falsification of love, her inability to reconcile her dreams with reality, her mother with her father, life with death, the invisible wound with the visible indifference. The deeply rooted pain of being uprooted, of not belonging, and finally her constant and chronic confrontation with cancer are indelible themes of her work.
According to curator Mitch Goodwin, “Christella’s paintings make for difficult, but soulful viewing. They are darkly euphoric explorations of the contrasting, often conflicting, modes of abstract expression. They endure because they explore a longing; a constant search.”
Christella rarely spoke directly in her paintings, however the directness of her poetry and the indirectness of her colours are communicating vessels. From her hospital bed, when she was stripped of all sense of ego, insecurity or fear she spoke her last words of love. Looking her sister straight in the eye, she said, “People are afraid to look at love directly, it’s overpowering. You are pure love, inside out, upside down, from all angles.” She also whispered to her, slowly and in anguish, “Life is a journey in the desert without relief… but you break the nightmare.”
Monster Tooth was Christella’s childhood nickname. A day after her death, artist and curator Elizabeth Gertsakis wrote to her friend, Run and fly, beautiful one!
Christella Demetriou passed away in 2018 at the age of 52.
Poetry Night (related event). On Monday the 13th of May at Ithaca house, Level 2, 329 Elizabeth St., Melbourne, at 7 p.m., academic Nick Trakakis will present his translation of major contemporary Greek poet Tassos Livaditis, whose poems have been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis; Some of the most polemic poems of Vassos Lyssarides, legendary leader and honorary president of the Socialist Party of Cyprus , will be read as a tribute on his 99th birthday; Edward Caruso will speak about his new poetry collection Blue Milonga which travels across the natural and political landscape of Argentina and Chile; Garry Foley will present Andrea Demetriou’s poetry book, The Inconsolable Clock, which expands from the wars for resources to the existential dead end, and is introduced by Christos Tsiolkas; finally poems by Christella Demetriou, translated by her friend Pavlos Andronikos, will be read.
Little did I know at the time, as a child running around the laneways and streets of Brunswick and Carlton that some 30 years later I would be walking the same lanes and streets, this time with camera at hand. I can’t recall why I asked my parents for a camera for my 12th birthday, but that’s when it began, first I thought photography was family pictures, then by the age of 16 I wanted to take sports images and photojournalism. By the time I accepted a position to study at RMIT the thought of making a living from photography was far from my mind, photography had become an art, to be view by your peers and general public in galleries. The years after graduating from RMIT in 1996 were filled with European and South American travel along with commercial photographic assisting, which I did not have a passion for. Through luck or fate I ended up opening a stall in 2001 at the Queen Victoria Market. So intone photography was created, keep it simple, create my own photographic artworks of my favourite subject matter which was Melbourne urban landscapes.
The last twenty years have been a great journey, a lot has been learnt, experienced and thankfully achieved. The opening of my string bean container (intone photography urban) has the potential for me to showcase a new and exciting range of works and ideas. I have learnt many things about trying to make a living as an artist, my most important rule was to always interact with the client, to better understand what they want and to help them understand what could be better. Another rule is to not rest on your laurels, many failures have come from doing this, develop ideas, push the boundaries, source your products and protect what you have built, I know far too well that what I have been able to achieve is far too rare unfortunately, so I don’t take it for granted.
I look forward to collaborating and exhibiting along side my fellow Greek – Australian artists, learning and sharing the processes we take creating our art pieces and gaining inspiration at the same time.
This pandemic has been a trying experience for most of us, if not all. Its been a bit of a reset button for myself, my reaction was to purchase a brand new lens and head to the streets and document the lockdowns, I loved the experience and produced some work that I was very proud of, much of which I shared on my social media instagram page @intonephoto which was well received, on the flip side my work also showed a lot of sadness in the imagery, mask wearing kids, shop closures along with bare streets.
Thank you for taking the time to read my artist bio. Tony Pierrakos
Bachelor of Arts in Illustrative Photography RMIT
(2001 – Present) Business owner intone photography Queen Victoria Market
2013-2014 Antipodean Palette Exhibitions
1997 Centre of Contemporary Photography Agfa Summer Salon
