Yannis Stavrou, forthcoming solo painting exhibition...

Yannis Stavrou, the poster of the painting exhibition

YANNIS STAVROU- SOLO PAINTING EXHIBITION
«Travel in Time»
IANOS Gallery, 7 Aristotelous St, Thessaloniki, Greece
October 20, 2009– November 14, 2009
Opening: Tuesday, October 20, at 7pm
Tel +30 2310 276447

Artistic, cultural guide to Greek landscapes through paintings, images, thoughts & literature

Greek landscapes

Greek landscapes refer to images and pictures of Greece, to art and culture, to history and myths, to civilization and contemporary thought. Greek landscapes express a holistic meaning: the profile of Greece. Art is the best way to approach the identity of the Greek landscape as art reflects the synthesis of civilization. Greek landscapes from Greek cities, Greek islands, Greece hinterland. Through pictures & paintings, poetry and literature, artists & poets, maps & links the unique Greek landscapes explore their myths...

An itinerary to to the Greek landscape through Yannis Stavrou painting

Yannis Stavrou, Greek landscapes from Greek islands and Greece hinterland: "Olive Groves", "Church in Greek Countryside", "Maritime Landscape", "Hydra Island Landscape", "Olive Trees", "Attica Landscape in Springtime"

An itinerary to to the Greek landscape through the history of Greek art /painting

Landscapes by Greek painters: Papaloucas, Altamouras, Ikonomou, Maleas, Parthenis

An itinerary to to the Greek landscape through Greek poetry

As if long prepared, as if courageous, / as it becomes you who have been worthy of such a city,
approach the window with firm step, / and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward, / as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe, / and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing

from "The God Forsakes Antony" by Konstantinos Kavafis, translated by www.ellopos.net


I I've kept a hold on my life, kept a hold on my life, traveling / among yellow trees in driving rain
on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves / no fire on their peaks; it's getting dark.

from "Epiphany" by Giorgos Sepheris, translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard


I found the leaves that the sun's psalm memorizes / The living land that passion joys in opening

from "Drinking The Sun of Corinth" by Odysseus Elytis, translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

An itinerary to to the Greek landscape through Greekhistory / Links

The Greeks
Greeks Interactive
The Ancient Greek World Index
The Amazing Ancient World - GREECE
EAWC: Ancient Greece
The Greek World of MARY RENAULT
Greece: History
Odyssey Online
Perseus Digital Library - Perseus: Greek and Roman Materials
Internet Resources: Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece: Archaic Greece, 800-500 BC
Ancient Greek Civilizations
The Ancient Greek World - Land
Classical Atlas Project -- Home Page
Ancient Classical History
Greece Sites
Ancient Greece
Hellenistic Greece
The Geography of Ancient Greece
Articles on ancient Greece
Lectures on Ancient and Early Medieval History - Main
110Tech-Greece
The Culture and Archaeology of Ancient Greece
Mare Nostrum: The Greeks
Latin and Greek Word Elements

► THE MINOAN & MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATIONS
The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean
Barbarians and Bureaucrats: Minoa, Mycenae, and the Greek Dark Ages - Contents
MAP: Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations c. 2000 B.C.
The Minoans
The Linear B Tablets and Mycenaean Organization
The First Palaces in the Aegean
Minoans: Religion
Minoan Palace
Minoans: Women in Minoan Culture
Minoans: Minoan Visual Culture
The Early Minoan Period:The Settlements
The History of Plumbing (CRETE)
The Myceneans
Mycenean Religion
The Dark Ages

► MACEDONIAN CIVILIZATION & ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great Timeline
Chronology of the reign of Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Army of Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great on the Web
ALEXANDER THE GREAT, Project by JJP
Alexander the Great history project home page
History House: Stories: Philip of Macedon (and Pausanias)
HWC, Alexander the Great
The Search for Alexander
History House: Alexander the Great
MAP: Alexander in the East
Plutarch's ALEXANDER
Hellenistic Greece: Alexander
History of Macedonia
Kings of Ancient Macedonia

► ART & ARCHITECTURE
ART HISTORY RESOURCES: Ancient Greece and Rome
The Parthenon at Athens
Parthenon
The Acropolis Museum
Acropolis Tour
Parthenon Gallery - Acropolis Plan
Acropolis Plan
Virtual Tour of Acropolis
Acropolis of Athens - 360 Virtual Tour
A Virtual Tour of The Athenian Acropolis
Acropolis Virtual Tour
The Parthenon - Ictinus and Callicrates with Phidias
Greek Art
Classical Greek Sculpture: Home
Greek Architecture
More on Greek Architecture
Greek Kouroi
Pottery and Minor art Collection
The Collection of Sculpture
National Archaeological Museum of Athens
Archaeological Museum of Delphi

► EDUCATION
The Ancient Greek World: Schooling
Coming of Age in Ancient Greece - School


► ATHENS & DEMOCRACY
Polis
The Foundations of the Greek Polis
The Ancient City of Athens
Culture of Athens
The Delian League
Ancient Greek Government
Greek Democracy
The Development of Athenian Democracy
The Development of Athenian Democracy
Solons Reforms and Democracy
Lecture 6: The Athenian Origins of Direct Democracy
Demos: Classical Athenian Democracy
The Buildings on Acropolis
Athens
The Age of Pericles: The Athenian Empire
Thucydides: Pericles' Funeral Oration
The Second Athenian Empire: 362-338 BC
Athenian Rowdies
The Internet Classics Archive | The Athenian Constitution by Aristotle
Greek reformers
Athens in 421 BC - Project Athinai

An itinerary to to the Greek landscape through contemporary thought

"P. Kondylis"

” The late Panayiotis Kondylis, Greece’s sole real modern strategist, was the only voice that brutally and publicly demolished accepted Greek illusions about a national security model exclusively depended on the imaginary willingness of others to provide the level of protection Greece is unable to provide for herself. In his Theory of War (1997) Kondylis warned that Greek troubles with Turkey emanated from the fundamental strategic error of Greece convincing herself that Turkey perceives EU membership with the same singular fervor as that permeating Greek political and economic elites — or, that Greece’s European partners are fundamentally committed to solidarity with Greece against Turkish actions come hell or high water.

These and other erroneous premises on the part of a country that fails to stand on her own two feet, and expects other to do what she cannot fulfill in her own defense, Kondylis argued, will mathematically result in the “European-ization” of Turkey working as the ironic lever of turning Greece into a permanent satellite of the Euro-Asian, neo-Ottoman Turkish great power through a protracted process of European-Turkish negotiation in which (a) Turkey makes constant demands for preferential interpretation of accession criteria and (b) the Europeans, in wishing not to slam the door in Turkey’s face but, at the same time, unwilling to openly water down EU criteria, choose the convenient outlet of offering “incentives” to Ankara at the expense of a submissive, but wholly “European,” Greece.

Kondylis’ conception carries a frightening logic that is confirmed in practice with each passing day. “

SOURCE

Yannis Stavrou: Painting & Books...

Summer 2009

50 new bookmarks from the artworks of Yannis Stavrou have just been circulated...

at POLITEIA Bookstores, 1 Asklipiou Street, Athens, Greece

A farewell to smoking...

Yannis Stavrou, Change of Night Patrol, oil on canvas

July 30, the last day of smoking in Greece...
A farewell to the companion of our thoughts, imagination, melancholy - in nice & bad days...

Some quotes about smoking:

Smoke your pipe and be silent; there’s only wind and smoke in the world.

Irish Proverb

Tobacco, divine, rare super excellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling, The Betrothed

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

Winston Churchill

I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.

Somerset Maugham

It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I' m sleeping.

Mark Twain

Man is the great deserter of being. *

Yannis Stavrou, Sunset on Acropolis, oil on canvas

*Emil Cioran, a great philosopher, a great poet...
The philosopher who touches upon the substance of the human nature.
Words are not enough. Let's enjoy some of his quotations...

• Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.-
  

- Drawn and Quartered

• Man is the great deserter of being.

- The Fall into Time

• Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

- The New Gods

• From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.

- A Short History of Decay

• What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.

- A Short History of Decay

• If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

- Tears and Saints

• The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge— that impersonal version of disappointment.

- Drawn and Quartered

• As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

- Tears and Saints

• What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and consent to exist.

- Drawn and Quartered

• My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

- The Trouble with Being Born

• We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.

- The Trouble with Being Born

• I feel I am free but I know I am not.

- The Trouble with Being Born

__________________________________

Source: Cioran.eu