Emanouella Strakiades. Interview with the artist

Written by Laura Moylan

7/8/2022

Emanouella Strakiades. Suprematism, 2022, mixed media

Laura Moylan: In the press release for your exhibition at the Atticus Arts Gallery your new body of work called as “something different,” and it represents a substantial change of direction for you. How do you respond to that assessment?

Emanouella Strakiades: I agree, except that I don’t see it as a change of direction. I see it as the same direction, just the next developments; substantial new developments.

LM: Please share your thoughts about the relationship you had with improvisation while you were making these paintings.

ES: I see the whole process of painting as improvisation. I think of something to do, I try it out, and it works or it doesn’t. Then I again respond to what is there. I keep improvising until it feels finished. What I chose to do can be based more, or less, on the recent past of my work, the older past of my work, other art, other things of any sort that I have seen, thought, felt or experienced, and all of the above -- and often it is something that just pops into my mind and I try it out. Of course, there are always unconscious reasons for things that “just pop into” your mind. I try to let my unconscious guide my work, because there is much more in the unconscious than in the consciousness. This is done via visual response to the unconscious impetus, not via psychological or literary analysis. I think one has to practice this kind of response in order to get it naturally and fully, because the general course of education is to erase it from your abilities, though it is primary and primal. It is also a broad experience of visual art denied by much academic criticism. This is because these writers simply do not understand, or see, the visual and explain everything in art through literary, political, or literal approaches. There are of course writers who do understand the visual. It is hard to write about.

Emanouella Strakiades. Painting Creates Itself, 2021, oil on canvas

LM: The works in this show convey to me a sense that they emerged out of some kind of negotiation. What feelings of conflict and/or cooperation did you experience during the process of their creation?

ES: Conflict or cooperation didn’t come into play -- at least not in my conscious experience. I suppose there is always a kind of negotiation – in the sense of: if I put this over here, and that over there, will it be better, or if I put it differently. I’m always weighing how well different things work. There is also an ultimate negotiation, I guess you could call it, when you have to decide between whether to keep a beautiful, amazing part of the picture, or sacrifice it in order to make the painting as a whole better. This is a frequent occurrence. Perhaps your question arises from the fact that all these paintings are divided in half vertically. And they apparently use several different kinds of abstract techniques. I found it interesting to have what could appear to be two paintings in a painting. And that I have made these two into one. And, really, three. There is each side and there is the whole. Perhaps there are really four: each side, the whole of the two sides, and the whole of the two sides and the one.

Emanouella Strakiades. Somewhere in the Universe, 2021, mixed media

LM: Is there a difference between conflict and cooperation?

ES: I’d say they are opposites. Of course, conflict resolution can result in cooperation. I don’t find that the areas and techniques in my new paintings conflict. I think that in each painting everything works together just fine. This doesn’t mean that all parts of a painting are the same.

LM: Please share your thoughts about your colour choices for this body of work.

ES: Generally, almost exclusively, I don't use earth colours or black. Only what I consider “spectral” colours. The primaries, the secondaries; lighter and darker. And various versions of them available from different paint manufacturers. There really isn’t an infinite variety of these specific colours – the viewer can only perceive a relatively few different shades of any colour (unless they are laid right next to each other, and even then, it’s not so many). Fortunately, the different manufacturing methods and different material sources provide variations. I use the primaries and secondaries mainly because their purity provides more intense colour, i.e, more colour. A redder red, a bluer blue, etc. These qualities also change depending on where you put the colour in the picture, what shape it is and how big it is. My sense of colour comes from many sources. First I am sure there is a native colour sense that each person has that is different. Then, there is all that I have seen, both in nature and in art. In addition, I did study the Albers colour system. The choice is from an unconscious interaction that tells me what colour to use. All color carries, or can carry, powerful feeling and meaning.

Emanouella Strakiades. Untitled, 2020, oil on canvas

LM: Do you feel that the colour relationships you've expressed in these paintings are different than the colour relationships you have expressed in previous bodies of work?

ES: No. Not to me. There are more painting techniques, though, so the same colours may appear different.

LM: In what ways did the process of making these paintings affect your relationship with gesture?

ES: Clearly there is stronger use of gesture in these than in those of the previous ten years. Gesture in the normal sense – the feeling of movement of the paint or from the way the paint was applied, and calligraphic line. Gesture (and as drawing) carries all kinds of meaning. I wanted to use more of it in these paintings. My work from earlier decades used broad gesture, too. In my mid-twenties I spent quite a bit of time studying Chinese landscape and zen painting, as I felt that these are a part of painting that a painter should digest. And around the mid-1970s, after a decade of working with shaped and three-dimensional canvases, and other related experiments, I “went back to the beginning,” put a chalk mark on a piece of black paper and redeveloped my work from there, exploring how marks become lines and make shapes. All kinds of lines and mark-making were explored over the years, The finest line becomes the outline for coloured shapes.

Laura Moylan is a writer and moving image curator based in London, and a runner-up in the Film and Video Umbrella and Art Monthly Michael O’Pray Prize.

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England.