Mission statement:
My mission as a fine artist and primarily as a painter, is to define what is beautiful and what is ugly. It has become obvious to me that this is my main purpose in life. I do not believe that beauty is subjective; there are rules on how to decide what is beautiful, nice, useful, proper...and finally: Ideal. Classical Greek art with its roots in the Archaic period have shaped my taste in such a way that I always decide what is logically and aesthetically accepted as beautiful rather than surrender to subjective aspects of the subconscious.
Contemporarily speaking, I try to discover this ideal in commodities among the ordinary and the insignificant things which surround us, because in my view, the ideal exists everywhere not only in the natural but also in the urban environment. I think also that copies of objects, or photos of the environment, which I present with my work are more important artisticaly than the reality. Art is among other things, a free and infinite procedure which is based on the ideal "fake" made by an artist of their own volition. As a poet K.P Kavafi expresses in his poem: "Artificial Flowers" (1903).
Artificial Flowers (1903) I don’t want real narcissi – neither lilies
nor real roses please me,
decorating trite and common gardens. I am grieved,
fatigued, afflicted by their flesh
their perishable beauty bores me.
Give me artificial flowers – porcelain and metal glories – neither
fading nor decaying, forms unaging.
Flowers of the splendid gardens of another place,
Where Forms and Styles and Knowledge dwell.
I love flowers made of glass or gold,
true Art’s true gifts,
their painted hues more beautiful than nature’s,
worked in nacre and enamel,
with perfect leaves and branches.
Their charm derives from wise and pure Good Taste;
they didn’t vilely sprout in dust or mud.
If they lack scent, we’ll pour out perfume,
Burn romantic myrrh before them.
By K. P. Kavafi
Translation by P.J. King and A. Christofidou In my practice I pay attention to the aesthetic rendering of my work. My drawing used to be very elaborated in the smallest detail but now I have reconsidered this approach and feel that it is not so necessary in the end. In some cases it looked like an obsession and this was not my intentions. On the other hand, I do not like to produce makeshift things because I cannot forget my background as an icon painter. I have been used to doing detailed work for many years. (This is not a mission statement, it is a confession!).
Apart from my aesthetic responsibility towards my practice, I have the need to give reasons for the course my work takes. In this very demanding process I have found a line back in time, to two major critiques one by T.E. Hulme and the other by W. Worringer. The former wrote: "Speculations: Essays on humanism and the philosophy of art": "Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end", (1936) and the latter wrote: "Abstraction and Empathy": "Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment. The value of a line, of a form consists for us in the value of the life that it holds for us. It holds its beauty only through our own vital feeling, which, in some mysterious manner, we project into it", (1908). Both of these really interest me and help my thought and research while I develop my "Empathy Line". I believe that my work and my preferences are connected with the proto-modernist artists and theorists who also belong to the context of my practice.
Although I study the practitioners and aesthetic philosophers of the past, a large amount of my work is produced through digital technology which I feel is unavoidable for contmporary artists. All artists, in the past, used the technology of their era in order to facilitate their practice and to present the beauty of their time. To sum up, I am in the beginning of my research but I feel that I have discovered the basic factors which influence my work, i.e. beauty, the course of time passing and empathy, while I continue to consider and evaluate the course of my mission.
Metaxia Chrona
Falmouth, UK, 20th May 2011
