Time to stand and stare

Time for the image to arouse the imagination

Time for the colours to work their magic

Time for the poetry of painted colour and form

To transport you through the painted world

Of Andreas Charalambides imagination

Time, the image, and imagination all become one

A true religious experience”

Sir Terry Frost

Speaking about that day, months later, we agreed that there was an awareness of having met somewhere before, maybe in another life, (if you believe in that). Never the less, this mutual emotion gives an uncanny bond of trust and understanding between two complete strangers, and so it was with Andreas and me, and so it continues.

Andreas was born in Paphos on the 28th July 1939. He is the elder brother, by four years, of two children.

Neither of his parents had any influence on his desire to become an artist, in fact they wanted him to grow up to get himself “a real job, study to become a teacher” they said. How often have we heard that!

As a ten year old he was made aware of having a considerable talent already by the encouragement and enthusiasm of his school teacher. Andreas was already painting in that most unforgiving medium – tempera.

At fourteen, during the summer of 1953, he worked as a labourer in the building trade, and also as an assistant to his father as a carpenter. But his determination to become a full time artist never weakened, and at school he studied the humanities, philosophy, mythology and the history of ancient Greece.

In 1957, aged 18, he left home and travelled to Athens to study Art. In able to survive he got a job as assistant to a set designer in films, being paid ten shillings a day, plus one free meal.

For personal recreation and fun, he played goalkeeper for the Poseidon football team (Glyfada), training three nights a week, which included another three free meals, to sustain a constantly empty stomach. With a game every Sunday it was a full life.

In 1960, a mature young twenty-one year old returned to Paphos and became engaged to his beautiful childhood sweetheart, Athena Orphanidou.

He taught Art in a Paphos school for a salary of forty pounds a month, and that same year sold his first painting at an exhibition of Cypriot artists held in the Famagusta library. The painting sold for forty pounds, a record at the time, equalling his monthly salary.

In 1962 Andreas and Athena married. They have two children, Michael, born in 1963, and Marietta, born in 1967.

The first solo exhibition of Andreas’ work was in 1963 in Larnaca. He did not sell a single painting. Nobody was buying paintings, it was a difficult time for artists.

Andreas and Athena and the new born baby Michael were living in a rented house, and Andreas’ salary had increased to eighty pounds a month. After a long lean time 1970 proved to be a year of success.

He had an excellent exhibition of his work in Nicosia, and an invitation to exhibit in Beirut, where there was a considerable appreciation of his work. His reputation was slowly being made.

In 1975, he was offered a scholarship from the British Council, which he accepted, through the guidance and influence of his mentor Terry Frost. His base was Reading University, and while in England he visited different studios, particularly the Cornish Abstract School of Painting. Andreas was painting in the Abstract at this time.

When he returned from England he held an exhibition of his latest work. It was possible to see a distinct style emergent. The Abstract developing into a personal vision that is still his own.

Andreas has, all his life, been surrounded by antiquities. The copper, the stone, the ocean, the materials, the substance of this ancient place. So is was ordained for him to want to reproduce the aura of his roots, his starting point.

When working on a painting, he feels that he is not creating an illustration, it is more a feeling of his own mythology that passes through a catalyst of something lived before, a feeling of deja vu.

In 1980, he finally left his rented house, with it’s studio of two and a half by two metres, and designed and built his present lovely home.

Andreas and Athena together collected thousands of stones and created the mosaics that decorate the floor of his terrace. At last, his own home and studio. The sweeping curves and fluid lines of his paintings are reflected in this beautiful house….open and free and warm.

When I asked Andreas who of the great artists had inspired him in his early studies, and who still stimulate him, without a moment of hesitation he said “Botticelli and Piero Della Francesco”, it was no surprise.”

Paul Kimberly
(TV and Film Director)

Click here to read more.

Uri Geller

The mastery of technique is apparent in the subtle textures and transparences that envelope and add to the forms and colours.

The use of rich colours…reds, golds, blacks ans whites and structure and scale to the context and forms of the painting.

For me Andreas is a “lifter up” of the spirit, a master of the necessity for quiet contemplation, which he in turn captivates and communicates to the lover of art the spirit and poetry of the certainty and indestructibility of the Greek Cypriot nation of painters and poets.”

Sir Terry Frost

]]> http://www.andreascharalambides.com/quotes/terry-frost/feed/ 0 http://www.andreascharalambides.com/quotes/mary-rose-beaumont/ http://www.andreascharalambides.com/quotes/mary-rose-beaumont/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 05:59:12 +0000 admin http://www.andreascharalambides.co.uk/?p=29 Continue reading →]]> “The paintings of Andreas Charalambides are wonderfully intriguing. They are composed and executed with the skill of an Old Master yet they are unmistakeably modern. On the one hand they contain within themselves the calm serenity of Pompeian frescoes and on the other hand they are resonant with the golden beauty of early renaissance alterpeices, yet they are painted in the full knowledge of the revolutions in art that have occurred in the twentieth century. From these many and varied strands Charalambides has forged his own unique language, a language which is essentially that of an artist steeped in Mediterranean culture, both ancient and modern, and in particular the myths and legends of his native land. The timeless quality which informs them, is the heritage of classical antiquity.

Charalambides glories in colour and light. He uses colour to it’s full intensity, deep azure blue played off against saturated reds, colours whose intensity is heightened by the dark browns which serve to set them off. At times he bleaches out the colour, making us more aware of the form. Often, as we have seen, he uses gold to accentuate the preciousness of the painting as an object as if it were indeed an altarpeice.

The consummate art of Charalambides is to combine his Greek heritage with the elements of European modernism. The references to myth and legend are clear, whether spelt out or Merely suggested. THE AWAITING surely surely refers to Penelope, the patient wife of Ulysses, who waited twenty years for him to return from his wanderings. Orfeus is the named subject of a painting, but the animals which he is representing as charming with his music are a sinister duo if the black bird and a bull’s skull, and the philosophers or wise men behind him seem to have turned to stone, and his own face is like a mask. The skull puts one in mind of Picasso’s many references to the bull, and in particular his use of the skull as a symbol of grief and despair during the second World War. The ghost of Picasso’s blue period also seems to be present in some of the paintings, and the heads of Charalambides women have an affinity with those of Modigliani in their calm classicism and ritualised lack of expression. Moreover the slight attenuation of the figures may owe a debt to El Greco as well as to Modigliani.

All these artists are men if the Mediterranean and their common culture is the thread which binds them together. Charalambides has fused and blended the influence of the past with his own vision to be at once a traditional painter and a modern innovator.”

Mary Rose Beaumont

August 1997

One suspects, though, that even less well known to the Cyprus fans is that rich vein of art of all ages that makes the island so exceptional. Writing during the time of British occupation of the island, in Historic Cyprus (1936), Rupert Gunnis commented: “This Cinderella of Empire has a rich and more varied history and more of interest and beauty than many of the larger and better known Dependencies of our Empire”. Within a relatively small area around Paphos one can find a range of historic masterpieces. At Palaiopaphos/Kouklia, the oldest and most important shrine to Aphrodite, there exists the first millenium B.C. Idol of the goddess, taking the form simply of a huge abstract icon that one cannot avoid seeing as closest in kinship to a Barbara Hepworth of nearly 3,000 years later.

At Nea Paphos, near the harbour, one can see a magnificent series of mosaics of the Roman era, only recently (since the 1960s) re-emerged to view through excavations. These constitute an integration of high art and decoration, and the subjects range from the serious – Orpheus and the Beasts or the Judgement of Cassiopeia to the less formal – two figurines rather the worse for wear, labelled in Greek The First Wine-drinkers (a topic not without relevance still today). All types, though, embody a depth of craftmanship and creativity, each singe tessera originally playing a unique artistic role in the transmission of a variety of glowing colours.

From the middle ages Cyprus has witnessed in the fields of wall-paintings and icons a succession of often high quality works of art in the service of religion. This succession was irrespective of national political control (Byzantine, Latin, Ottoman) and reflected how, as in Poland or Ireland later, the Church in Cyprus became the only institution that could effectively maintain and represent the spirit of the nation. At the monastery of St. Neophytus, near Paphos, two chambers carved out  of the mountainside contain a series of 12^th century painted narratives and grouped figures, covering and enveloping the whole area of walls, ceilings, doorways, the stark religious images suggestive in form and colour of core truths and mysteries, in spite of subsequent damage and restoration.

The icons of Cyprus too share this hieratic quality, as is only to be expected granted their virtual function. Here again, as in the wall paintings, we get a range of colours, programmed to act as symbolic messages relating to the subject, and with often an added glowing translucency that is both sensuous and deictic, set in gold, tempting the eye of the worshipper or beholder to become immersed in the bewitching mysteries of religion.

While obviously in type and imagery the religious art of Cyprus shares in a common tradition of Orthodoxy, it is nonetheless distinctive, of its own nature, thus paralleling the status of the Church in Cyprus as autocephalous, that is, autonomous within a wider oikoumene.

Since the nineteenth century Cyprus has had built public buildings (schools, museums, post offices) and public monuments that sit easily within the artistic ideologies of the rest of the world. Since the Second World War, however, certain figures have emerged who not only hold their own in a wider context but also individually excel. A painter such as Christopher Savva (1924-1968), while he undoubtedly drew on his training and experiences in London and Paris, returned to his homeland to produce an art that was also emphatically of Cyprus. More recently, Stass Paraskos, while learning from the time he spent practising and teaching painting in England, has returned to Cyprus to continue producing work that is distinctive, personal and original – all qualities he seeks to instil in students at the Cyprus College of Art in Paphos which he founded and still runs.

The work of Andreas Charalambides is certainly of the present, yet it is also timeless and resonant of the past. The title figure in Orpheus reflected in a broken mirror is drawn from antiquity; his lyre and the pipes, as well as a lyre, a bust, an amphora in other paintings are all clear markers of the classical past. Yet Three Muses, while they may sound antique, are emphatically of today. Occasionally one of his figures features a mask – is this a symbol of a layering of identity, one age attempting to conceal the living presence of another beneath?

A suggestiveness, a sense of mystery pervades Andreas’ work, many paintings insistently maintain their detachment, much as the icons and mural paintings of medieval Cyprus remain relentlessly seeking to impose a sense of awe. Similarly the presence of shadows, the darker tones, apart from a universal psychic relevance or a reference to that present day political threat mentioned before, these passages of the dark evoke the enclosed, tenebrous majesty of that original physical environment where one should truly view Byzantine church art in its genuine context, while the glowing colours, fretted in gold, of the icon may be the distant inspiration for the golds and translucencies of certain Charalambides paintings.

Others, though, are bright, cheerful, of today, possibly symbolising that light and celebration that are also characteristic of Cyprus. One remembers the happy scenes of the mosaics at Paphos or the frequent brilliance of the beach near Pissouri where Aphrodite in legend came ashore. Unlike many stories of old where several places lay claim to be an original site – at least seven have asserted they were the birthplace of Homer, in one’s school days one was taught to recite: “Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athinae” – this spot seems undisputed, and it can serve as archetype for the uniqueness of Cyprus’ artistic riches, which continue into the present day and include the work of Andreas Charalambides.”

Benedict Read
Fine Art Department
University of Leeds