Michael Winters

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Born in 1943, Australian artist Michael Winters’ lifelong artistic journey began with his studies at the Caulfield Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1963. Fueled by a deep passion for art history, especially ancient Greek marvels, this passion led him on a transformative path to Greece’s artistic heritage.

In October 1965, he set sail from Melbourne on the “Patris” to Athens, a city rich in archaeology and urban tapestry. A fortuitous encounter onboard shifted his trajectory, as he met Greek traveler Antoni Tsaloumas. Tsaloumas’ invitation to his home island, Leros, initiated a profound connection with the island and Greece, influencing Winters’ art.

Returning to Australia in 1974, Winters met Dimitri Tsaloumas, Antoni’s brother, a prominent writer. Collaborating on illustrating poems sparked a lasting friendship and a series of artworks. His visits to Greece, particularly Leros, inspired him, leading to his recognition as an Honorary Citizen of Leros in 1995.

Greece’s influence on Winters’ art grew evident through his linocuts, capturing Greek landscapes and human stories. During a 1990 Crete stay, he created works commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Crete, blending military history and mythology. The collection exhibited at the Australian War Memorial in 2005.

His artistic journey transcended borders with exhibitions in Greece, Sweden, England, and Australia. His works were submitted for the Archibald Prize thrice. In 2023, he featured in the “Antipodean Palette exhibition,” invited by the Greek Australian Cultural League to launch the event, celebrating his enduring connection to Greece as a true philhellene.

Media Articles & News

MWinters Ermou 51, Church & Sunset 2002 Linocut 56 x 76cm

MWinters Church Door & Shadow-Leros 2008 Linocut 50 x 35cm

MWinters CliffFace & Church-Monevasia 2018 Linocut 76 x 56cm

Effy Alexakis

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For over last four decades, Effy has been documenting the historical and contemporary presence of Greek-Australians both here and overseas, in partnership with historian Leonard Janiszewski. She is publicly recognised as ‘the photographer who popularised Greek-Australian history’ and is acclaimed as one of Australia’s leading socio-cultural documentary and portrait photographers.
Renowned for her intimate and sensitive portrait presentations, she is considered a pioneer in debunking Greek-Australian stereotypes and presenting the complex personal, diverse and evolving faces, lifestyles and occupations of Greek Australians, across generations.
Effy’s images are held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian Embassy in Athens. Effy has curated and co-curated various fine art, photographic and sociocultural exhibitions, together with sociocultural installations.
Major cultural spaces around the country have exhibited her work. Effy has also exhibited internationally. Her two most significant exhibitions have been the ‘In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians’ (this is also the title to their ongoing national archive project) and ‘Selling an American Dream: Australia’s Greek Café’ that was launched at the National Museum of Australia in 2008. With Leonard, they have produced four major books; three extensive exhibition catalogues; more than 250 book chapters, articles or conference papers; and three film documentaries.
In 2022 Effy was recognised as a ‘Woman of Influence’ by the Hellenic Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (HACCI) for her photographic documentary work spanning 40 years. In early 2023 Effy’s work was published in a new book, ‘Forty Photographs, A Year at a Time’ where she selected one contemporary image from her vast archive to represent each year since 1982 to the present in order to reveal the changing face of Greek-Australians.
In late 2023 she will be releasing her latest book, ‘The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios’ Soup Kitchen’ where since early 2021 she has been documenting the work of Father Nektarios, a Greek Orthodox priest who with his many volunteers have been providing a soup kitchen from the church hall at Sts Constantine and Helen Church in the inner-west suburb of Newtown.

BA, from Sydney University, in 1980, majoring in Fine Arts and Archaeology
Diploma in Education (Secondary – Art), Sydney Teachers’ College, 1981
Post-Graduate Diploma in Professional Art Studies (Photography), from Sydney’s City Art Institute, 1983

RECENT EXHIBITIONS
FORTY PHOTOGRAPHS – A YEAR AT A TIME EXHIBITION
Greek australian experience as a forty year photo chronicle, neoskosmos.com
New photo exhibition, sbs.com.au
Forty photographs year time exhibition, greekherald.com.au

SURVEY EXHIBITION
A greek australian portfolio, greekcitytimes.com
Newest exhibition combines photographic work spanning four decades, neoskosmos.com
Photo exhibition in sydney captures spirit of greek australian community, greekherald.com.au
Sydney exhibition of photographic work over past 40 years, greekherald.com.au

GREEK CAFÉ EXHIBITION
Milk bars and rock music living the american dream in a greek cafe, www.smh.com.au
Australias greek cafes, www.smh.com.au

INTERVIEWS
A visual history of greek australians, ekathimerini.com
Honouring the photographer who popularised greek australian history, neoskosmos.com
A symposium celebrating the work of the greek australian photographer, sbs.com.au

The Heart of Giving, Father Nektarios' Soup Kitchen (New Book cover)

Binding Threads, new (work in progress) project

Stella Tsirka

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In memory of Stella, whose work had a profound effect on the cultural life of the Greek Community of Melbourne, with the request that the following excerpt and images about the life and work of Stella Tsirka be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).

Stella was born in the old city of Athens. From a young age she showed talent in music and art. After completing high school education she attended music lessons at the University of Athens. She is a self-taught artist and has been practicing her painting for more than 20 years. Her technique, although simple in execution, is quite effective in describing feelings and highly charged emotional states. In many of the compositions one can see surreal elements as if coming straight from her subconscious to dominate an otherwise quite logical landscape. There seems to be an on-going struggle between logic and the subconscious, between what one expects to see and what appears in a landscape.
Stella’s is a very personal style, derived from her own life experiences and her desire to express feelings which lie too deep for words. In landscape and portrait painting Stella found the perfect medium of artistic expression.

Στέλλα Τσίρκα

Γεννήθηκα στην αρχαία Αθήνα. Μετά τη μεσαία εκπαίδευση, φοίτησα στο πανεπιστήμιο μουσικής στη σχολή μονωδίας της όπερας της Αθήνας.
Από μικρό παιδί έδειξα ταλέντο στη μουσική και ζωγραφική. Με την ζωγραφική ασχολήθηκα περίπου είκοσι χρόνια. Αγαπάω τον υπερρεαλισμό. Τα χρώματα μου είναι από μαγεία των αγριολουλουδιών και του ουράνιου τόξου. Έχω προσθέσει επί πλέον μαύρο και καφέ σε διάφορους συνδυασμούς. Η σκιτσογραφία μου πηγάζει από το υποσυνείδητο με αντιμέτωπους την λογική να διαμαρτύρεται αλλά η σκέψη μου το παρουσιάζει έξω να το γράψω, έτσι το βλέπω

neoskosmos.com 10/03/2022

Stella Tsirka - Waiting for the dolphin2

Peter Tsitas

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In memory of Peter, whose work had a profound effect on the cultural life of the Greek Community of Melbourne, with the request that the following excerpt and images about the life and work of Peter Tsitas be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).

neoskosmos.com 08/02/2021

A deep interest in the environment and how people respond to place is at the core of Peter Tsitas’ work – as an architect and town planner, and an artist and photographer. At first glance, the sleepy coastal fishing village of Warneet, at the head of Western Port Bay, has little in common with the island country of Cuba in the Caribbean. Yet Peter’s response to both reveal an eye trained to look at where and how we live.

While Warneet and Cuba are very different, both are places that have been left relatively untouched by progress. Warneet is quiet, a recreational fishing village surrounded by wetlands fringing Western Port that are internationally protected for the large number of native birds, animals and plants. Peter has been visiting regularly for 30 years and has captured the surroundings in a variety of media in that time.

Whether photographing, drawing, using pen and ink or pastels, the isolated beauty, ebbing tides and wide-open sky has proved a restorative and ongoing fascination for the artist. Not much happens at Warneet except for the tide going in and out, the fishermen standing preoccupied and silent on the pier and the ubiquitous boats sailing the inlet and bay. The mangroves, which are very forceful as they try to assert their dominance, have proved another enduring interest for Peter.

In 2005, Peter travelled to Cuba and based a major photographic series on his experience (Cuba Now! Steps Gallery 2006). These drawings in oil pastel explore habitat and while they contain no people, the presence of the local community seeps through. As a town planner, Peter appreciated the human scale of Cuba’s cities and towns, and the repetition of stylistic elements in the architecture. While Warneet is about nature, Cuba is about how people live; Peter was fascinated by the tight lanes and the constant element of surprise. “You’d walk around a corner, hear singing and all of a sudden you are at a café with live music, people coming together to share food and have fun. The sense of belonging is paramount.

Christella Demetriou

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“In memory of Christella, whose work had a profound effect on the cultural life of the Greek Community of Melbourne, with the request that the following excerpt and images about the life and work of Christella Demetriou be used for inclusion in the Greek Australian Art Directory (GAAD).”

Media Press Release

Run and Fly, Monster Tooth!*
A posthumous exhibition of paintings by artist Christella Demetriou

1st – 30th May 2019
Darebin Arts Centre, cnr Bell St & St Georges Rd, Preston, Vic. 3072

A posthumous exhibition by Christella Demetriou, Run and Fly, Monster Tooth!, will premiere at the Darebin Arts Centre on Wednesday, 1st May. The retrospective will feature a selection of works spanning Demetriou’s career as well as artefacts celebrating her diverse and multi-layered creative life.
Esther Anatolitis, Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, will open the exhibition. Commissioner, Rosaria Zarro will represent the Victorian Multicultural Commission. Artist & curator, chair of arts Mildura board, founder of museum of innocence Mildura, Domenico De Clario, & poet Andrea Demetriou (The Inconsolable Clock) will speak about her work.

Christella Demetriou was an artistic polyglot. She not only excelled as a painter, but was also a composer, a classic instrumentalist of the bouzouki, an unknown poet and an athlete. A refugee from what is now occupied Cyprus, Christella and her family migrated to Australia in 1976. She exhibited widely and performed in both Australia and Greece.

As a painter Christella was an artistic cryptographer, she used abstraction to hide within her paintings everything she could not endure, everything she could not face. She paints her feelings, her despair at the elusiveness and the falsification of love, her inability to reconcile her dreams with reality, her mother with her father, life with death, the invisible wound with the visible indifference. The deeply rooted pain of being uprooted, of not belonging, and finally her constant and chronic confrontation with cancer are indelible themes of her work.

According to curator Mitch Goodwin, “Christella’s paintings make for difficult, but soulful viewing. They are darkly euphoric explorations of the contrasting, often conflicting, modes of abstract expression. They endure because they explore a longing; a constant search.”

Christella rarely spoke directly in her paintings, however the directness of her poetry and the indirectness of her colours are communicating vessels. From her hospital bed, when she was stripped of all sense of ego, insecurity or fear she spoke her last words of love. Looking her sister straight in the eye, she said, “People are afraid to look at love directly, it’s overpowering. You are pure love, inside out, upside down, from all angles.” She also whispered to her, slowly and in anguish, “Life is a journey in the desert without relief… but you break the nightmare.”

Monster Tooth was Christella’s childhood nickname. A day after her death, artist and curator Elizabeth Gertsakis wrote to her friend, Run and fly, beautiful one!

Christella Demetriou passed away in 2018 at the age of 52.

Poetry Night (related event). On Monday the 13th of May at Ithaca house, Level 2, 329 Elizabeth St., Melbourne, at 7 p.m., academic Nick Trakakis will present his translation of major contemporary Greek poet Tassos Livaditis, whose poems have been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis; Some of the most polemic poems of Vassos Lyssarides, legendary leader and honorary president of the Socialist Party of Cyprus , will be read as a tribute on his 99th birthday; Edward Caruso will speak about his new poetry collection Blue Milonga which travels across the natural and political landscape of Argentina and Chile; Garry Foley will present Andrea Demetriou’s poetry book, The Inconsolable Clock, which expands from the wars for resources to the existential dead end, and is introduced by Christos Tsiolkas; finally poems by Christella Demetriou, translated by her friend Pavlos Andronikos, will be read.

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