Elements from both my cultural background and my everyday surroundings are prominent throughout my work, aspects that I find both appealing and repulsive as crucial inspiration. I use shapes taken from the human form, urban objects and architectural structures and I add intense and playful colours. This way of working transforms objects like roof antennas and accumulated buildings into colourful shapes. With humour, I try to force people to think about the western culture that surrounds us.
By doing my own documentation of the streets with my camera, I then use these images to produce my work. I precisely choose the elements from a picture that I then want to develop into sketches and finally into a finished body of work. Following these steps, I try to maintain the aesthetics of my culture and create a piece that communicates them with the viewer.
Frequently my paintings create a contrasting environment to my sketches as they are created in different ways. The paintings often feature bold harsh coloured lines using spray paint and acrylic, thus they represent the spontaneous life of the streets as well as the fast-developing world that we live in. In contrast, through my sketches, I try to maintain memories that need careful handling when reproducing them through lines. For them, a black pen is more than enough to express simply forms of existence.
Maria Paraschidou 