Human triptych
For three artist sisters in Limassol, sharing is not just about a workspace, but individual works of art too
Walk into Maria, Christina and Anna’s studio and you will find yourself tripping over a veritable cornucopia of artworks, canvases of every shape take up most of the available wall space and those that cannot make the wall stand leaning in rows.
Meanwhile, the floor is densely cluttered with tins of paint and everywhere lashings of Jackson Pollock type ‘spatterings’ mark those overenthusiastic moments when a brush missed its mark. It’s a studio bursting with creativity and a very happy place to visit.
Over the years, this rather wonderful, if slightly eccentric, trio have produced hundreds of glorious, sun-drenched canvases, and with healthy sales generated from each of their two annual exhibitions they now find themselves in the enviable position of being able to make a reasonable living from their art.
Whether or not you like their art, there is one thing that cannot be disputed, the sheer enthusiasm and passion these women display in their chosen medium. Looking at their canvases I did, however, wonder why the usual uniform and exact squaring was absent, with the result the word skew-whiff came to mind, as almost every one of the canvases was lopsided or, in some cases, had hugely uneven edgings.
Anna Kelogregovi went on to explain this somewhat unique selling point. “Our father takes great pride in helping us. He makes all our canvases but at 83 his eyesight has become quite bad and he can’t really see straight edges, but, we would never dream of saying anything to him. He so enjoys helping us and that really is what’s most important to all of us”.
This slightly wonky approach sort of sums up the sisters; they are totally unfazed by most things not caring in the slightest they are not at the cutting edge of the Limassol art scene. Neither is any time spent on networking as these women don’t really care if folk like their work – perhaps because they always do and, again, that’s what really matters.
The other unusual element to their work is the way they pool their various talents. One sister may well conceive a picture and start it off while another finishes it – again this seems to them to be perfectly natural, watching them it’s clear there is no rivalry.
Only two have had serious art training: Anna and Christina both studied in France, while older sister Maria has had to fit painting in around being a mother to five children and grandmother to four.
Maria could, perhaps, be labeled a deconstructionist, taking religious images then marrying them with paint, shells, cloth, anything that strikes her fancy, resulting in a series of rather wonderful and very powerful iconic images.
Anna loves angels and flowers and these images feature heavily in almost all of her paintings, but as all three work on each others’ canvases it’s sometimes difficult to know who has the strongest influence on the subject matter, is it Christine who has the confident broad brush strokes and passion for pure colour, or, are all three sisters so at one with each others’ work each canvas becomes a human triptych?
The great sage Aristotle identified a strong tendency to melancholia in the artistic temperament and many still refer to artists as those who are blessed with a thin partition between talent and insanity. Meeting these three sisters there’s not a single sign of any Chekhovian depression, their personalities are like the work they produce: joyful, passionate, generous and very nice to be with, and their paintings bring the same sensations.
Tel: 99 563820
