Abstract Paintings of Sophia Savalas

September 14, 1938 to April 29, 2009

Sophia’s Abstract Paintings exhibit a living breathing extension of her Greek family heritage. They were informed and influenced by the ancient methods that she used in her smaller Icon paintings. In her abstracts, Sophia worked with mixed media of oil, collage, dry pigment, metals, plaster and found objects.  The focus of her work is inspired and rooted in Greek Mythology as a source of her unique contemporary visual expression. Her paintings symbolically evoke the trials of the aspiring human soul in quest of a deeper understanding of life’s cycles, challenges, and mysteries.

As one reviewer commented, “Her work embodies a sense of odyssey, stepping into the unknown, as in the heroic journey and its transformation of consciousness. . . that track the hero, the immigrant, the adventurer or the artist in the process of growth, both personal and cultural. . . . Hers is a deep feeling of recognition of impulses and connections that bind, define and differentiate her past and present condition as contemporary artist. . . In Savalas’ work the un-selfconscious flow of culture. . . and the unique upon the universal, reverberate resolutely, repeating notions of creation, spirituality and beauty against the backdrop of the ancient draped in postmodernist trappings of humor, topicality and cultural integrations.  In the striking Innumerable Ancestors, a mixed-media piece on venetian plaster, depicting the 16 children as doves (Savalas’ parents, aunts and uncles) encircling her seated grandparents, a quote from Kasantzakis’ Saviors of God is etched into the wood: ‘The cry is not yours.  It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth.’”

Hayward, Carl.  Review, Art Papers Magazine, Nov./Dec., 1999.  Atlanta, GA

Paraphrasing the reviewer in large part, Sophia has translated the voices and cries of her heritage into an utterance of beauty that not only honors the specificity of her place of origin, but also honors the sacred beginnings of all people who remember the source and resources of that starting place.