Bill Mousoulis

Bill Mousoulis is one of Australia’s most distinctive filmmakers – prolific, resourceful, and independent, with 10 features and 100 shorts to his name since 1982. Most of his work was made in his hometown of Melbourne, but in 2009 he based himself in Greece (producing two features there), and from 2017 he has been based in Adelaide.

Mousoulis’ work is unconventional and eclectic. Influenced by the realist, humanist and formalist cinema of European auteurs such as Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini and Chantal Akerman, he has created a body of films of remarkable variety, across different genres. His films have screened at over 500 events, including film festivals such as the Melbourne International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Athens International Film Festival, and others, picking up various awards.

A number of his films are held within the National Film and Sound Archive. He has also been involved in film culture, in various ways, as a critic, programmer, and committee member of different organisations.

In 1985 he founded the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group; in 1999 he founded the online film journal Senses of Cinema; in 2003 he founded the website Melbourne Independent Filmmakers; and in 2018 he founded the website Pure Shit: Australian Cinema.

Since 2018, together with Chris Luscri, he curates the Australian film programs Unknown Pleasures and Australian New Wave. He also retains connections in Greece, being a member of the Greek Film Academy since 2014.

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

Lambrini Niaros

I’m a resin and multimedia artist. I draw my inspiration from my environment and am constantly inspired by Mother Nature. I explore the concept of the ocean through organic movement and fluidity. My work reveals an intuitive approach with fluid compositions, particularly suggestive of ocean-like forms that explore the interactions between the shallow and the deep. My layered works convey the ambiguity and complexity of my local environment.

Creating artwork has allowed me to explore dynamic colours, organic movement and and fluidity.

Stephen Caldis

I am a plein aire landscape painter and also painter of Hellenic themes of a historical nature or of pure Hellenic ethos.

My Hellenic works are passionate, original and nationalist, with a strong appeal to many born in Greece as well as first generation Greek Australians.

My work has been hung in NSW Parliament House, The Greek Embassy Canberra.

I have twice exhibited in The Blake Art Prize and once in the NSW Plein Aire Art Prize.

In 2009 and 2011, I was awarded the Hunters Hill Council Art Prize NSW and also received several minor art awards.

I plan to exhibit a selection of my work (‘Zembekiko’, ‘Limnos 1915’ and ‘Sunset of the Hellenes’) in Greece.

Anne Warren (Sampsonidis)

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)

Events & Projects

2018  Mergence @ Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra

2010 Winner, Tales of a Greek Migrant, Hellenic Museum, Winner
The kindest adult colouring book of all time – art fundraiser.

2015 Curated 23 contributing artists by Anne Warren 

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.

Stella Tsirka

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

neoskosmos.com 10/03/2022

Georgia Tsarouhas

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.

Krom@tic Art exhibition, MADS Milano, Milan 2021

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