GEORGE SFOUGARAS ARTWORKS

It seems like a good point in  the blog to write a little on  Making Art 'Full Time': I am now two years down a path that I had always dreamed of. I have been making art almost full time, unfettered by the concerns of a demanding job and young children. As everything else in my life, this path has been full of surprises. Making art has proved to be a much more demanding affair than I anticipated. When I was making art as a pass-time and a way to escape from work and life pressures, it was a nourishing and therapeutic activity. This sense of art being a stress-free activity, probably persisted until a year into my 'retirement' from teaching.  What was the catalyst for the change of pace, direction, expectation...is not easy to pinpoint. I think that I became acutely aware that my art needed some kind of audience. This was not new, but what was new, was the sense that making art  every day inferred another kind of responsibility.  I turned a si...

' Talisman' Part two: 'The Reliquary'.  Elements of this panel are images and symbols suggesting that our views are culturally biased and that the best way to understand an adversary' is to engage with the culture that he subscribes to.  Significant components: 'Turkic' features of the main figure; common in Greek and Turkish populations. Deserted Village, signifying loss and movement of peoples on both sides. Şehzadebasi Mosque, the work of Mimar Sinan Ottoman Architect, 1990s. Reliquary Vessel - Greek Orthodox.  Based on the Reliquary Vessel containing the head of St. Titus in Crete. Identical Church and Mosque. Military Boots. The second of the three images which I call 'The Talisman' suite ( a bit posh, I know!), came about as soon as the first one had finished, more or less. At one time, I used to look at a lot of reference material before starting a piece and often it felt like I was looking for things t...

'Theia' The third and final panel of the trilogy  collectively entitled 'Talisman' is about the life and times of my aunt. It is a symbol of her, not a portrait and it attempts to capture some salient and personally significant memories of her and aspects of hers and my cultural inheritance. Significant components: The house. The dark clouds. The dressmaker's dummy. The wounded  Byzantine eagle. The flower embryos. The sewing machine. The tapestry blanket of memories. Weaving beauty into the midst of it all. The golden sovereigns. The pin cushion and needles. Little flowers of happiness. Tinted with sepia ink version. Final screenprints, which were approximately 2.5 times the size of the original drawings.

The 'Talisman' Work 'Talisman' The work that I made around the theme of 'Talisman' is really a collection of thoughts and ideas which relate to the idea of psychogeography, of feelings that are connected or rooted in a particular geographical place. This work and several pieces preceding it are motivated by a need to reconcile and reflect on our own human journey both ancestrally and existentially. Studies of medical anatomy and the embryo, refer to the way we evolve as people depending on our cultural context as well as our genetic inheritance.  The embryo itself is connected to 'nodules' of knowledge transmission (these are shown as actual physical objects in the drawing). As I was doing this, I felt the need to record and ‘map’ the process, consciously noting next to the drawing the actual ideas and various narratives as they emerged.  I was thinking about the genetic code that shapes its life and even the architecture of the b...