I started drawing the churches, cathedrals, mosques from all around the world. I took the symbols out, as I believe they are the weapon, something that separates us

“Painting is one big lie. It is a lie that every artist tries to change, to give a meaning to; it’s a utopia. And I lived this utopia so many times.”
Also a lie is all the limelight and publicity that artist Alkis Astras avoids so much. Don’t ask him about his art – the question is too trivial for Astras to answer.
The art speaks for itself, he says. The artists – well, they only whistle.
“I can’t describe it. We are talking about real creation here – when you are under the influence of creation, you are beside yourself. Art is a heavenly thing,” Astras tells in his sincere artistic way, quoting his long time friend, and famous Italian painter, Sergio Agostini.
“Alki, my friend; we, the artists, don’t have a voice. We whistle. We are dangling in midair, while our works walk ahead of us,” Agostini would remind him from time to time.
That’s why, in Astras’ case, the paintings have replaced speech.
Greek Australian Alkis Astras is like a ‘method painter’. With a spiritual and philosophical trajectory, each body of his work is preceded by months or years of travelling and experiencing what he is about to depict on the canvas. This is why his paintings have been characterised as ethnological and he has been described as the ‘Odysseus of the visual arts’.
He has lived with Aboriginals in Arnhem Land, Australian miners at Mount Isa, Greek monks at Mt Athos. He has immortalised the Aboriginal people, whose religion of a dream time never ceases to inspire and affect the artist.
After months of integrating with Aboriginals in their settlements, he had even prepared an exhibition, with only Aboriginal people depicted. The exhibition, however, never happened. It was the year 1968.
Then there are the miners, another group of people that inspired Astras’ work. He spent six months with miners, at Mount Isa in Australia, studying their life and painting them. As with all of his full-of-symbolism paintings, in the faces of the miners Astras saw Byzantine saints and their wrinkled foreheads.
For more than 50 years, Astras has travelled the four corners of the world, making paintings out of his traveller’s experiences.
Childhood facing the Acropolis
Born in Dionysiou Aeropagitou 33, between the Makriyannis and Thisseio districts, in the shadow of Acropolis, Astras spent his youth in the dark days of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War.
“When I think about my life in Greece now, it was a stolen life. The house in which I was born, facing the Acropolis, was used as headquarters both by the enemy and by the allies during the war,” Astras tells Neos Kosmos.
Against his father’s will, who wasn’t an art believer, Alkis Astras took his first lessons in drawing at the age of 16. The interior architect degree was a way to compromise with parents.
Since his first personal exhibition in 1954, he never ceased creating and exhibiting all over the world.
The artist’s fascination with Australia, which he visited in 1964 for the first time, led him to travel 56,000 miles in a one-year-long around the continent trip. Australia would later became his home.
A sense of flight
A sincere in his words artist, unaffected by modern world movements, the 83-year old Alkis Astras explains his life in simple but potent words.
“My life is a complex life; I changed many countries and travelled a lot. I was travelling to search the world and to get a new subject for my painting,” Astras says.
For him, travelling is not a selfish source of inspiration only. It gives you ‘another, different’ feeling.
“In every country I visited, the first thing I would think about was; it would be great if I was born in this country. As many countries I visited, I had this feeling. I like travelling, but not as a tourist. I like to travel, to live amongst people I visit,” he explains.
A great talent, whose works have been acquired by collectors that include John F. Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis, and the Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, Alkis Astras spent months of his life in India, Indonesia, China – during the period of Mao Zedong – and many other countries.
Pieces of his life are visible on canvas, as well as pieces of the lives of his characters, their emotions. From Astras’ work, it emerges he is not only a painter, but equally a philosopher, architect, poet.
He is something of a ‘lazy artist’, he tells as he speaks to Neos Kosmos from his Gold Coast residence. He is not interested in mass production of his work, nor in the financial factor of art producing. That’s why, for Astras, having an exhibition is a bit of a hassle.
His life is travelling. The artist describes this as a ‘developed sense of flight’ – from responsibilities, from every day routine.
“I think I had, and I still have it, that microbe of leaving – escaping – my responsibilities. Now when I think about it – maybe I just wanted to escape from myself, I don’t know,” Astras says.
“To cut a long story short, I met him – the second Mr Alkis – and we are doing well at the moment, me and the other Mr Alkis. I spent countless hours walking in the clearings of the past, trying to get to know that other Alkis.”
Sacred places
Alkis Astras was the first artist in history to be granted an art exhibition on the peninsula of Mount Athos in Greece, one of the holiest places on earth inhabited by monks for over 1000 years, to celebrate his paintings of the monasteries located there.
The idea came 15 years ago when the artist visited Mount Athos, without being fanatically religious. He was researching his Christianic roots.
With the realist style of painting of a practising architect and painter, Astras is mostly visible in this body of work, Sacred Places, that was exhibited in Calgary, Canada, in 2006.
“I was looking to find the one and only God, the Creator. I started drawing the churches, cathedrals, mosques from all around the world. I took the symbols out, as I believe they are the weapon, something that separates us. I was drawing them as a contribution from believers to the one and only God,” Mr Astras explains.
The exhibition was originally named The Houses of the Lord.
In his Gold Coast residence, the 83-year-old artist still paints and draws. He keeps avoiding exhibitions – he is not that kind of an artist, he says, that has ‘a stock’ and mass production. And now, he paints for himself, and for those who commission a job from him.