Costa Vavagiakis
Costa Vavagiakis
“As a child in Greece, seeing the bronze Charioteer of Delphi was a seminal experience for me,” Vavagiakis notes. “As an adolescent I absorbed the lessons of many Baroque masters, including Caravaggio, Velasquez and Rembrandt. I intuitively recognized in their art a fusion of classical structure and naturalistic observation, a fusion at the heart of the dialogue within my own work.”
Peter Selz, in his review Costa Vavagiakis: Recent Paintings and Drawings, writes “… Vavagiakis speaks about his obsession to paint and he considers his work like a mission to find the visual truth in representing the human form. … (He) has dedicated his work to the continuum of depicting the human image, which, in the face of all the monumental changes in history, continues substantially unaltered over time.”
In drawing and painting many of the same models time and again, Vavagiakis strives to capture the sitter’s essence. “I do dozens of drawings of the same sitter as a way of becoming familiar and cultivating an intimacy. Using drawing as more than just a preparatory tool I do repeated drawings of very similar poses, exploring subtle shifts of axis and mood in the model so as to better familiarizes myself with them. And the eventual concept of the painting is a synthesis of all of these drawing experiences.”
“My oil painting technique is labor intensive. I build up wet-on-wet layers. Periodically, as the paint dries, I scrape and sand before applying more wet-on-wet layers. The process of slowly building and layering is analogous to penetrating more deeply into what I am seeing. As I layer, I come closer to what I see. And in this way, I build up a sculptural surface. Ultimately, the brush strokes are indiscernible, so that the translucency of the skin appears. I place the sitter against a white wall and illuminate him or her from a light above to accentuate the volumetric dimensionality of the form and to give the viewer a sensation of encountering a real person.”
Vavagiakis’ training in art took place at Queens College and the Art Students League, both in New York. Some of his recent exhibitions have been held at the Lesley Heller Gallery in New York, The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Frye Art Museum in Washington; The Museum of the City of New York, The Art Students League of New York, and the Staten Island Museum in New York.
When not conducting workshops at Gage, Vavagiakis teaches in New York, New York at the Art Students League of New York; National Academy of Design, School of Fine Arts; 92nd Street Y and serves as a Visiting Artist/Critic at the Chautauqua Institution of Fine and Performing Arts in Chatauqua in Chautauqua, New York.
For more information about Costa Vavagiakis, please visit please visit his web site: www.costavavagiakis.com, or contact the artist. To preview Vavagiakis' online workshop video, please visit Drawing a Portrait From Life. For additional information about this video workshop, please visit YouTube.
