“When you are 64 and you have been painting for more than 40 years the challenges are greater,” says Paul Laspagis of his long career as an artist.
“You are challenging yourself more as you are evolving further and further.”

Never one to sit on his laurels, Laspagis keeps harnessing what he describes as his “pictorial language”; a way in which an artist makes sense of the world, how Laspagis makes sense of his world.

Born in Greece, the family migrated to Australia in 1957. Educated in Australia, he went to Collingwood Tech and began work as a trainee draftsman. At the young age of 18, he had an almost epiphany; he didn’t want to be part of the system.

“The system was, you went to school, you got a job, you accumulated money, bought a house, got a wife and I could see the treadmill everyone was getting onto and I wasn’t interested in it,” he tells Neos Kosmos. “I found myself locked in an office in the city looking at buildings stuck there; I couldn’t see a future there. I thought ‘is this how life is going to be for me?'”

It wasn’t going to be the life for him, so at 18, he began studies at the National Gallery School (not the Victorian College of the Arts) under the tutorship of renowned Australian artist John Brack. It was the ’70s and the tutors of the college had a very lax attitude towards teaching. He remembers it was very much a case of you knock on their door when you need them, otherwise, it was pretty much each student doing their own thing and finding their own way. As a student, he remembers being influenced by many artists, especially expressive art that interested him the most. But he’s the first to admit that as a 19 or 20-year-old you haven’t really consolidated the direction you are going to take as an artist, and for many it takes years.

“I’m still finding my way,” says Laspagis openly, “and I am slowly refining and developing my own pictorial language.”

Pictorial language is simply his way, his take on the world through the artwork. His way of expressing what he’s
seen and describing it through the point of a pen, through the stroke of his paintbrush.

“The world is out here; it just exists, it has no language,” he explains. “So we create a language to speak about what we see, so we absorb that visual experience and through our own knowledge, subconscious and sensibility, we reconstruct in a two-dimensional format that which interests us.”

“The foundation of the subject is there, but it’s a more poetic kind of interpretation that I have,” Laspagis says.

He is loath to describe his style, as he simply doesn’t believe in an artist having set boundaries of their work, pigeonholing themselves and conforming to one specific genre.

“I believe in an artist developing their own pictorial language,” he says, “they speak about their own experiences with their own way of interpreting and shifting through what interests them in their visual experiences and how their translate through painting and drawing.”

He says his main interest in his work is and will always be based on the “visual experience”; a reflection of what he sees. Luckily for the artist, he’s based in the Victorian suburb of Ferntree Gully, which combines the concrete world of suburbia with the natural forest close by.

“I look at the suburban landscape and study that then I go into the forest and study that and I’m interested in the natural tranquil environment of the forest,” he says of living and working in Ferntree Gully, “but increasingly it’s becoming more about the internalisation of the visual experience rather than the illustration of what I see.”

Being an artist to Laspagis is a “painful and stressful process” to him.

“Each painting has its own reality and it has to evolve, you have to breathe life into the , so each painting is a unique challenge, so it’s an adventure for sure because the outcome is never known.

“You have failures, less and less as you go along. You can visualise, and you have to as you are painting each step at a time, but the final outcome is all the decisions you make along the way and you try to make the right decisions, but you can correct things as you go along as well.”

To date, Laspagis says that the exhibition ‘Reinterpreting Landscape’, which opens today, is his best work yet.

“This is the best body of work I’ve done,” he says, “they are on a large scale, they are more developed and refined than in the past and I’ve worked more with colour now.”

The artist is hoping to send the collection over to Greece and exhibit in a gallery in his island of birth, Lemnos, some time this year. Until then, the artist will continue to develop, move forward and make sense of his world through his own language. After all, to him “painting is a rejoicing of what [he sees]”.
The exhibition ‘Reinterpreting Landscape’ opens today at Langford 120, 120 Langford St, North Melbourne, VIC and runs until 19 April. For more information visit www.paullaspagis.com