Seven years ago, Soula Mantalvanos was sitting on a fitball in her studio at home. Wanting to protect her back from any damage, she thought, wouldn’t it be better to sit on this than on a chair all day. Seven years ago, that fitball burst and she dropped instantly onto the concrete floor. Seven years ago, Soula’s life changed forever.
Being a sufferer of chronic pain is a silent and solitary journey. It’s not a tangible illness, it’s hard to explain, but it’s there in everything you do.
“I can’t pick up a full litre of milk, for example,” Soula tells Neos Kosmos. “Everything hurts, sound hurts as it affects all your senses, it hurts to be in a busy environment.”
“You don’t want to see anyone because it causes pain and you’d rather just stay in your home in your comfort zone and know you can do something, even it’s drawing for five minutes, but I look back and think we are all made a certain way.”
Soula had to change her whole life when the injury first happened. As an artist, as a graphic designer, this was going to be the difficult part. But to survive, she needed to. She would paint in five minute durations, then rest. She would rely on her husband for 24/7 care. She had to distance herself some days from family and friends to conserve the very little energy she had to cope with the pain.
“I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even speak,” she says, when the injury first happened. Four and half years it took to get a diagnosis of some kind, and now with proper treatment and a back implant, she’s making good progress.
As part of her therapy, Soula began to paint the pain. She started with painting herself which she says was “horrific”; the portraits were hideous and heinous.
“If you decide you are going to paint the pain, it will come out,” Soula explains.
“I would spend hours saying ‘when I go back this time it’s going to be a happier painting’, and you can’t because you’ve already said I am going to paint the pain.”
She said “all these monsters were appearing” and she asked husband Theo to pack away the canvasses because with these portraits she felt as though she was in the pain all the time. This wasn’t her, this wasn’t who she was as an artist. She had to figure out another way to paint the pain.
A trip to Italy surrounding by masks and facades gave her an idea to remove herself somehow from being the direct focus. On the plane back to Australia, she watched the movie My Week with Marilyn and thought even Marilyn Monroe hid her pain behind a mask, a façade. A self-confessed lover of characterisation, Soula decided to create a marionette that would become the subject of her artwork: Miss Soula was born. Miss Soula was the therapy Soula needed to put something between herself and her artwork.
After this ordeal, Soula admits as an artist – as a person – she has changed. The subject of her work has changed, the disciplines of her artwork has changed, and her day-to-day living has changed.
“From the 50 things you would normally have done in a day, you can only do ten,” she says, “and you change the way you do things as you are not the person you used to be, you have completely changed and you have to look after yourself.
“If you are going to get better, you have to change; as the more you trigger [the pain] and poke it the worse you get.”
As a young girl, Soula remembers waking before anyone else in the household, and sitting in front of the television and drawing whatever she saw on the TV. She’d sit there with her pencils on the tray table and draw. When it came time for her to choose her year 11 subjects in high school, she decided there and then to pursue a solid career in the arts. She studied year 11 art and year 12 too. In the course, Soula learnt about leadlight, sewing, drawing, graphics, and she loved it. She enrolled in design at Victoria University in Prahran and out of the 2000 students going for the 200 places, she was accepted.
Now she lives with Theo in their converted warehouse apartment and studio in the art precinct of Collingwood, in Melbourne’s inner city. She started her design business Origin of Image over 17 years ago. For 13 years, Soula and Theo have been running the business as co-directors, with Theo handling the client side and Soula the creative side. Being a designer and artist suits her perfectly.
“I love both,” she says, “I love design because there is a challenge – you have to conform to that brief and you have a client where you have to find a solution perfect for them and their needs, and their audience.”
“And then you turn to the studio and it’s do whatever you want with art. One world is loose and free and one you have to conform,” she says.
Not having a preference, Soula says both worlds are perfect for an artist living with chronic pain. She says she can literally turn her chair and go from design and then to artwork in her studio. Just getting a little done each day, just a snippet, means she’s achieved a great deal.
The creativity kept her going. Even when she couldn’t do much, she wrote notes in a journal. Having a great relationship with her husband and her Collingwood community has made all the difference in her recovery.
Soula paid homage to her community, the people who gathered around to support her and kept her connected to the outside world, in a collection of etchings she did on Gertrude Street. These etchings have been selected by the Greek Australian Cultural League to be presented at their annual exhibition Antipodean Palette.
“The community is a big deal when you have chronic pain,” says Soula. In a sense, she says your community become your family as your family you protect from the truth and reality of chronic pain. So to say thanks to her world, her Collingwood collective community, she created these etchings; and in a roundabout way, they too are artwork born out of her journey with chronic pain.
Antipodean Palette will launch this Thursday 22 May and runs until 1 June, at Steps Gallery, 62 Lygon Street, Carlton, VIC. On Saturday 24 May from 10.00 am – 1.00 pm, and 31st May from 1.00 pm – 4.00 pm, Soula will speak about her copperplate printing process.