Trouble in paradise: one artist's experience of the financial crisis in Greece

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Sue Ward talks to painter Daphne Petrohilos about her life as an artist on the Greek island of Kythera, and how she is using her art to help the children of the island.

Sue Ward: At what age did you decide to become an artist? Is there a family tradition in the arts?

Daphne Petrohilos: I think almost everyone is born with some natural creative intuition, the environment does the rest as time goes on.  I don’t really remember making a conscious decision to become an artist, I just followed what I was capable of doing and where I felt productive in some way.  We had a lot of creative people in our background growing up in London, our father is an architect and our mother had studied art in Germany and worked in theatre and television.

Our house was always full of ‘mad folk’, as we saw it, and nothing that we might have perceived as inspirational wading through the party debris on a Monday morning. I can say though, the colour and vibrancy of those years probably left us with confidence to process things from an artistic perspective because there was so much freedom. My brother designs and builds wooden boats for fun and my sister works for human rights, both excelled academically and both are also passionate and talented musicians with a lot of guts. I can only play instruments based on tapping or ringing noises but our sing-songs are legend.

SW: How did you train?

DP: At about five years old the school noticed I didn’t speak much and was slow in learning, so they sent me to be observed for possible signs of autism. I loved it, two days a week out of school in a room full of drawing, painting, plasticine, jigsaw puzzles, and no one telling you you were doing anything out of order is any kid’s dream but I was well behind in everything else by the time they decided I was for all intents and purposes normal. I think it was the most formative experience of my artistic career – partly because any attempt to streamline  into formal academia and greater socialization was now well botched. As hard as it was to catch up, which I never really did no matter how badly I wanted it, it prepared me to be OK in my own world, regardless, and gave ease and relevance to a very natural practice early on, which is a big gift.  By the time I went to the Art Intstitute of Chicago for my BA much later on , I was less excited about the diploma than I was for the time and space to work.

SW: What are the main concerns you are addressing in your art?

The main concerns I address in my paintings are composition, competent use of materials, and narrative. All three must operate at the same frequency or the work fails for me. It’s the same in life, being conscious of the space between things and where they connect and then explaining them to the best of one’s ability. My work is almost strictly figurative,  I adore stories and things that ask for inner intelligence to unravel and feel part of.  I do a lot of vignettes of places and people I see that stand out as relevant to the times or need to be observed.

SW: Which artists have influenced your style?

DP: I have a deep appreciation of so many artists and fellow beings no matter how the creativity manifests, but I can’t say I’ve  been influenced so much by any of them as I have just by the way I feel in front of certain paintings or anything else that moves me.  If I can grasp what they are saying, and what they are saying is genuine, I am inspired to continue as if I can accomplish the same in my own way. John Singer Sargent’s portraits are like heaven to decipher,  ‘In the Lemon Grove’ by Emil Nolde is on my mind when I’m painting true love, and passages from the Odyssey often infiltrate into pieces that require yearning  and resillience to complete.  Overall though, life is the best influence yet.

SW: You now live on the Greek island of Kythera, traditionally the birthplace of Aphrodite, south-east of the Peloponnese peninsula. How did you come to live there?

DP: I came to live on Kythera with two suitcases and a duffle bag immediately after I graduated from the Art Institute in the summer of 1992. I frankly had no other ideas. My mother had bought a ramshackle farmhouse on a remote hilltop there a few years before and had since discovered the island was where our forebears on our fathers’side had been for over 600 years.  Despite its being a shadowy and forgotten corner of nowhere at the time, it was my first true sense of place and the coincidence  was intoxicating so I stayed. My mum had converted the chicken house into a little room for me to stay and work, so I did pictures on scavenged scraps of wood, made pocket money out of sign painting for local shops in my terrible Greek, and tried not to annoy my mother too much.  I married, had my son,  raised goats, and spent the next 15 years restoring  the house. I painted everything  I saw, some of the best shows I’ve ever done have hung on the walls of the corner cafe in the village with the sound of business and the people I painted sitting beneath their portraits without realizing it.

SW: Can you describe your typical working day on Kythera?

DP: A typical day on Kythera begins for me at sunrise, I walk the garden at dawn to see what it needs until the light is right in the workshop.  I also have a full kit in the car so I sometimes go for a drive and just stop if I see something to paint. I had a duck for a while that used to come with me; I couldn’t keep him out of the car. I go to the sea a lot, but by early afternoon I’m at the house  and evening belongs to the garden until I can’t see anymore. In summer this is all interspersed with revelry, where in winter I would be keeping an eye on the wood supply for the stove or going about the work in the gardens, olives and such. 

SW: Please describe to us what Kythera is like. Is it very different in the winter months compared with the summer? Does it have a community of artists?

DP: It can get pretty cold in winter with marvellously frightening storms, enough to have to dash about and make sure nothing  outside or in is being washed away or struck by lightning. I’ve had a couple of close calls myself.  The light is so intense in summer though,  I paint in the latter part of the day instead to avoid the heat outside. There has never been much tourism on Kythera, maybe because there’s more history than sandy beaches and the general atmosphere is that of secrecy and rest.  Nothing about it has really been commercialized or lost its mystery, and that alone seems to serve artists and writers or people in need of sanctuary of which there are many.

It helps that Aphrodite is ever present, from skipping village dances to some pretty intense human drama in the shadows.  I spend a lot of time in Crete now, where my son goes to school and the energy is completely different.  Aphrodite on Kythera compared with the axe and bull worshipping of Crete is a pretty big philosophical distance though the two islands are only four hours apart by boat. If there is a boat.

SW: I understand that under the extreme economic austerity that Greece is suffering the children of Kythera are really enduring all kinds of hardship. Can you describe to our readers what this means?

DP: The economic situation in Greece has been very harsh these last few years. We could say so much about how and why it came to be but it won’t change anything in the present. At first, we drove a little less, halved our time at the cafes, and didn’t replace the porchlight if it burned out. Within a few months we had no cars or home phones, no coffee even at home, and oil lamps were all the rage. The choices were made for us so any romance in this image was lost.  In small island communities there’s always the option of turning over a field or raising a few chickens, which has been a wonderful thing to see come back, but enormous new taxes have bled any sense of working for future security and those without a plot of family land are at a base level feeling helpless.

One lad I used to tutor cares for the animals and garden that feed his six-member household (complete with bedridden elders).   In the time I’ve known them they went from three working adults in the offices of the municipality to  one income from a much coveted street-sweeping contract for half the year. As lawful people with enormous dignity,  they wouldn’t let me continue tutoring their boy unless I accepted payment in eggs and onions. These days I just go down the road with a load of pencils and paper,  all nonchalant just as I would alone and then quietly gesture all the kids of the village to follow so there’s no embarrassment. There are still little bags of what they grew and sometimes as much as a piece of baked rabbit hidden in my car when I get back. That sense of gratitude for something so simple almost breaks my heart.

But paradoxically, it’s the same chaotic tribal instinct that I think put Greece into this ditch that’s behind the level-headedness of sharing in times of need.  Some I know are eating fishhead stew and knuckle soup but if you bring some furniture for the stove,  everyone is fed and the evening is complete.  Even so, as a parent there’s a constant underlying sense of inadequacy bordering on desperation should your child need even the simplest of things, such as shoes or an antibiotic. It’s worse in winter of course, work almost completely dries up without the little tourism, there’s heat to consider and how the kids will get to school now they have stopped the school buses. The schools on Kythera are rarely if ever heated and teachers are struggling along with tiny wages and few resources.

SW:  I also understand that you are using your art to help the situation.  What form does this help take?

 DP: I had stopped painting after the loss of my son’s father and other unusual calamities that followed two years ago. We were lucky in that he left a small income that afforded a period of introspection so I jumped on the opportunity for a damn good labyrinthine  lament and left my brushes to dry.  Now two years later I was sitting in the kitchen at my wits end with a pile of unpaid bills and new recipes for fishhead delights,  and wondering if I ought to apply for a street-sweeping contract in Crete or Kythera to get us through. The next day I cleaned out the unused workplace and, because I work on chronologically based themes, rarely showing the same painting twice, I found a little forgotten unsold stock just waiting to be in other peoples houses. 

The proceeds of some of these works would have gone to charity anyway as I always tithed or gave works up for charity auction and there they were now while need was growing everywhere I looked.  I sent photos out to people I knew who liked my work but couldn’t purchase from the galleries in the past and offered them for the price of the gallery commission alone and a hand in giving some support to the locals. Giving changes everything. The money goes to organizations that provide relief and to the local schools who know exactly which families are distressed and they discreetly pay the electricity bills for them or give them a little sum at Christmas and Easter.  Peace at home is essential to peace anywhere else. Some also goes to ‘Doctors without Borders’ in Crete, where the uninsured can get treatment or vaccines.

SW: How do you see the situation in Kythera unfolding over the next few years?

 I’m not sure how the situation will unfold over the next few years, I almost stopped guessing or even thinking about it. I’m trusting that we’ll  have resolved to get this beautiful mad place in balance without falling back on unworthy habits.  We might also remember our familiarity with the land and the respect it deserves because sometimes, like now, it’s  all you can truly dance about.

SW: Daphne, thank you so much for talking to Cassone.