In honour of the Athonite Monks

Inspired with the simplicity and harmony of monastic life in Mount Athos, artist Lee Zaunders Maroulis faces the ultimate challenge with exhibition 'A portrayal of humanity'


Depicting the human condition, for painters, is the ultimate challenge. When you are painting a person, it’s an intimate and personal process. You have their history, their life, feelings, looks, their anatomy, psychology, their image in your hands.

Having painted for all her life and with a 20 year teaching career behind her, the time and practice of painter Lee Zaunders-Maroulis is now dedicated to depicting portraits and the human condition – a process of mixed emotions, at times controversial, and at times incredibly rewarding, as she describes it.
Born in Taree, north of Newcastle, Lee Zaunders-Maroulis grew up in a town with no art galleries, but with natural galleries of different ethnicities in close proximity – Italians, Lebanese, Greek, English, indigenous.

“I was always curious about cultures; they fascinated me. It was my grandmother who encouraged me to paint, and I have painted ever since,” Lee tells Neos Kosmos.

“For a painter, painting is a dedication – it’s not an occupation. It’s like breeding, not something you think about.”

It was during her masters expertise that Lee expressed her interest in the history of painting the human flesh and human condition. But for this challenge, as she refers to it, it took years to develop the confidence and the understanding on how to approach it.

“To recreate human vision – and to paint by hand is to create a human vision – is to touch and to be touched. I am recording the human condition and I am telling certain truth, perhaps from my perspective. It’s the visual feature of life that I am depicting, an individual story recorded.”

Painting those who decided to live in celibacy must be the ultimate of all challenges; intruding into the lives of those who have been determined to monastic life and obedience, to abstinence, ‘to silence of the lips and humility of the heart’, as Professor of Byzantine Studies Peter Vandeun puts it.

The first portrait Lee Zaunders-Maroulis ever painted was of a nun who taught her piano at the Taree Convent. She was 12 years old. Little did she know that decades later, it would be monastic life that would inspire her work and comprise an exhibition, ‘A portrayal of humanity: Monks From Mount Athos’, that opens on 5 May at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Newcastle.

“At university I did a Russian icon painting. It’s like a higher order of art. They have been creating icons and book illuminations for millennia – it’s beyond beautiful and it substantiates their beliefs, their religion. It’s reaching back to the past, and this beautiful way of living and life is still there.”

For the artist, every stroke of a brush is the equivalent of a letter in a word. The accumulation of brush strokes can describe a person’s image. And that’s what Zaunders-Maroulis does in this series of 20 monochromatic and colour portraits.

“Words can describe a person. We can read them, we can visualise what the person is like, but I always believed that the painting can take it even further.
“In many ways the painting process may portray a life that has been lived. This exhibition is a portrayal of the humanity of individual Athonite Monks; a celebration of their existence today.”

Maroulis turned to portraying Athonite monks and was already inspired by them, without even being able to get close to them in real life. The reason for this, she says, was their simple, unadorned existence – a rare and beautiful thing.

Married into a Greek family, whenever the artist would visit her former husband’s grandmother, the curious gaze she would throw on the house icons and church memorabilia were like open questions for the matriarch. A trip to Greece followed and the whole different culture – that of the quiet, affiliated with nature monastic life, in the monastery in Kefalonia – made the artist realise there were many ways of living a life.

“These monks offer their image as a reflection of our own humanity. When you are painting you are conscious of the fact that as you lay the paint, at some point it becomes flesh, it takes over, it starts to reinform you. It describes the person.”

The fact that the imagery of the portraits was derived from photographs didn’t stop the artist extracting information and finding the essence of Athonite monks in each painting. Painting them, she says, was like living their life.

“I’m on my own, in seclusion, I look at them all the time, their eyes, face, expression, and think – they are just ordinary people like all of us but they just choose to live this extraordinary life. And in a way, this exhibition is a way of honouring this culture, and thanking them for encouraging me and believing in what I do as an image maker.

“It’s a celebration of their existence. There are few people in the contemporary world today that live a life of such simplicity, in harmony and with respect for nature; not many people are conscious of that today. You see them, and you slow back and think – this is another way of living life. Their dedication and quiet strength has led them to endure for millennia, and I just think it’s their exquisite works of art, their book illuminations, their iconography, the architecture and music, that has always supported their beliefs.”

The opening of the exhibition ‘A portrayal of humanity: Monks From Mt Athos’ by Lee Zaunders-Maroulis will be held at the Church of the Holy Apostles, 11 Steel Street Hamilton NSW on Monday 5 May, from 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm. The exhibition will be open to the public until Saturday 10 May, from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm.