Artospective: Surrealist Paintings by Spiros Gelekas from Greece.

SUNSET FROM ANOTHER WORLD.

An Interview with Spiros Gelekas.

Who and where are you from?

I am called Spiros Gelekas and I am a self-taught painter-artist. I was born and raised in Corfu, Greece where I live until today.

How you got into this?

My development as an artist began in my early childhood. My first stimuli were the comics and especially “The Thundercats” and Marvel’s heroes. I started by copying the drawings of the stories I read and I continued with composing and illustrating my own narrations using the same heroes. My first essential contact with the art of painting occurs in 1998. I will experiment mainly with classical themes, representation-copying the reality, landscape composition using classical technique. As time passes by, my human evolution will be determined by the 90’s books, fantastic literature, with typical examples of the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion, Science Fiction movies such as Star Wars, Lord of the rings, and rock music, mainly Rock Opera and Progressive Rock. All these together, compose my artistic amalgam which makes me able to produce my purely personal art. Writers who contributed decisively to my way of thinking and expressing myself are Alan Poe, Tom Robbins, Carlos Castaneda, Umberto Eco and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in the place of the most important.

What is your driving force?

Except from my personal human completion, through my art – my personal way to express my thoughts to the world - I aim at offering an aesthetic satisfaction, daydreaming, opening

mind and parallel our physical and mental eyes. I aim at the creation of a world that will extend beyond our own one, which is visual and conceptual finite. The driving force in my art is my personal journey for the creation of a new fantasy world. It’s like composing an other type of "fairy tale". A “fairy tale” that is not something fake but a different aspect of our physical-material world. A fantasy world from my point of view.

What kind of work you do and why?

I study and embrace the artistic movements of surrealism and realism, fully aware of the fact that the former feeds of the soul of the latter and vice versa. Through my art, I seek their union, aiming to a comprehensive "explosion" of emotional and mental pleasure

Tell us more about your thought process.

Anxiety, joy and ecstasy are the three words which describe what I feel every time I see an empty canvas. A ritual followed gently by preparing the canvas, the colors, the brushes. The smell from the fresh box-canvas is a real pleasure. I usually start directly with a brush or knife, depending on the technique. Rarely I make a draft. I have studied in my mind every movement, each line, each color. Sometimes I cannot make it so easy and I get anxious until I have the result in every detail, as I have imagined. But in the end, the result justifies me. A creation happened again, I m thinking timidly in the back of my mind. Another step towards to immortality. But I do not speak for it with people. To be honest, sometimes I want to go back to the time of the process, to do it again. I cannot describe the enjoyment of every moment that passes and gone. I feel nostalgic every time a project ends and maybe a bitter joy. I seperate a piece of myself, which is ready to travel out to the world.

Please share with us the one modern artist whose work you find Interesting and why?

Principal inspiration - Artists are Salvador Dali and Roger Dean. Salvador Dali gives realism within the sphere of surrealism and Roger Dean uses a supreme technique for the creation of a world which is similar to mine.