Early Work

Early work, this painting is called Gris Parfum—kind of like, fragrance grey. I love this painting because it’s very unpredictable. Juxtaposing colors I normally never put together. So, you have these kinds of grey, and brown, sandy brown stripes mixing with a more blue-grey, pink and yellow. I just like the color palette, and I’m doing a lot of weird things here—using touches of white, not using brushes, but instead using brush tips. Here, experimenting again with crafting different kinds of gesture on the canvas. So, I think it works as a piece of art.

This is my first painting (2013). It’s my debut as an officially pretty good artist, I think. A simple painting called, Lemon Awnings. And it’s basically yellow on white stripes. Ironically, this painting I tried to make as perfect as possible with just solid yellow and white stripes. But what I like about it is, no matter how much the human hand tries for evenness and for perfection, there is variation. So, yeah, this is a painting I really like—it stands as very iconic and is an homage to summer, or something very light.

This painting is an early painting of mine. Kind of like the yellow painting, this is Beach Roses. And this is my earlier style where I’m really looking for kind of perfect stripes. This is a very hard painting to do because every stripe’s a different color and it’s hard to get all these different pinks harmonized so they don’t look ridiculous. And it’s actually kind of an homage to Beach Roses. On Martha’s Vineyard you have these big rambling rose bushes at the beach which have these types of rose hips, these fruit which are kind of pinkish, orange. But I think the painting is a success. Quite a struggle to do. It took forever.

So, this is one of my earliest paintings, which I love. And this is called Chilmark Pond, and this is where after the yellow painting, this is my third painting. I’m happy that I could take two colors that are very similar, but slightly different, and when you juxtapose them, you see a subtle difference. It’s sort of like this idea of tone on tone. But what I love about it is it juxtaposes these sort of color tones I love like a blue-ish green with a green-ish blue. It’s one of the sort of successful paintings of my early period where I was really looking for like perfect color fields.

–STELIOS author of The Oculus