A scan from the American Art Collector magazine of the same piece.
Interview with the Artist
CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST JOHNIENE PAPANDREAS
There is tangible sense of mystery and drama that the viewer senses rather than sees when confronted by the paintings of Johniene Papandreas. And “confronted” might just be the right word. Each large scale painting fills the plate glass windows at Gallery Voyeur at 444 Commercial Street in Provincetown, MA with an emotional intensity that may, quite literally, stop you in your tracks, and the paintings with their searching expressions or confrontational stares certainly make it hard to turn away.
“Some people experience a cascade of reactions,” says artist Papandreas. “The first impact is almost visceral. Then, as they look deeper, they are carried into a kind of shared intimacy with what the subject of the painting is experiencing. The effect I hope for is that they realize the “experience” that seems to be emanating from the painting is actually manifested by some aspect of their own imagination or personal life experience.”
The Gallery—in Provincetown’s East End—is a new venue for Papandreas, who spent the last 25 years designing for the theatre. She began that career in New York in the late 70’s and ran the gamut from Off-Off Broadway to regional theatre and opera before bringing her design abilities the world of ‘corporate theatre.’ “Designing for the corporate world served me very well, but it has been a long time since I have allowed myself such a free level of personal expression, and it is very satisfying. I have also realized that my time away from painting was not time wasted, though I always thought it was. Everything I have done seems to have informed what I want to do now and how I do it.”
During this long absence from painting, Papandreas began to notice how the way she looked at paintings in books and museums began to shift. “I suppose it has something to do with how we process visual information these days, and maybe because of my background in the theatre, I have always been particularly attuned to the concept of ‘subtext.’ In the work of the Italian masters, particularly Caravaggio, I got the sense that there was much more going on than met the eye, and as I looked longer, I found myself drawn into particular details of the scenes, almost as though there was an emotional vortex.” She was inspired to explore this inner world from a modern point of view using the classics as a springboard.
“Where the artists of the Italian Renaissance, French Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite periods were telling specific stories for the viewers of their time, my ‘details’ are chosen to awaken an emotional response in the modern viewer. I divine and isolate an area that I think contains a ‘charge,’—either of mystery, sensuality, or emotion—reframing it in a way that will focus the viewer on what I see, and then paint them on a large scale, which serves to further amplify the power in the painting.” Through this evolution, the context of the original painting drops away and what you see and feel is something new, the distillation of a charged essence. “We are assaulted by millions of images all day long, most of them coming to us in constant short bursts. They have the cumulative effect of numbing the viewer. I hope to stop someone long enough with my paintings to let them experience a kind of communion with themselves that may not be all that accessible in today’s world.”
She has recently begun exploring the same perspective to paint from living subjects. “It’s not portraiture per se. I like to say the person is not so much the subject as the object of the painting... it’s more about some intriguing emotional aspect that might be revealed and explored.”
As if the paintings were not enough, there is an added intrigue at Gallery Voyeur. It not only houses the paintings, but also the artist’s studio. Papandreas is in residence during the summer months to greet visitors and in the fall and winter when she does her commissions she can often be found painting in full view of anyone who happens by. “I think people like to watch artists work, and it is enjoyable for me, too. I have no problem conversing as I paint and like being there to experience the reactions people have to the work.”
It is, after all, Gallery “Voyeur.”