In the history of art, it is not uncommon for artists to be inspired by poetry. Sometimes, they are influenced by a general poetic atmosphere in shaping their own efforts, while other times they draw from specific poems. As indicative examples of the first category, we could mention the British engraver, painter, and poet William Blake (1757-1827), who illustrated, among many others, Young's Night's Thoughts (1797), the Book of Job from the Old Testament (1823), Dante's Divine Comedy (1824-27), and the second category, the Greek painter, sculptor, and engraver Kostas Tsaras (1928-1986), with his paintings in his posthumous album Resistance and its Songs (1998).
The painter and poet Georgia (Zorzeta) Kampani (1929), originally from Andros, belongs to the second category we just described. After spending some years in Athens, she settled in Quebec, Canada, in 1965. She worked in various studios and attended free art history classes. In 1989, she turned to poetry. Her earlier painting served as a starting point for her first poems. Then, the face of the reader replaced the face of the viewer, realizing that the relationship between poetry and image is strong, that poetry and image have writing as their common foundation. She participated in numerous group exhibitions and had thirty solo exhibitions in Canada. In 1998, she felt that the time had come for her extensive production in both poetry and painting to be published in Ottawa: thanks to the sponsorship of the Canadian government, she presented the trilingual book Poems-Paintings-Symbols. In 2003, she returned to Greece, where she devoted herself, with a renewed perspective, to the study of important Greek poets.
For this particular album, she chose, by personal inclination, creators who wrote poems with various symbols, open to interpretation: she isolated verses by (in order of birth) C.P. Cavafy, Angelos Sikelianos, George Seferis, I.M. Panagiotopoulos, Yannis Ritsos, Odysseas Elytis, Kostas Stergiopoulos, and Dimitris Kitsikis, adding one of her own poems. The nostalgia for her homeland, after a long absence, invigorated her enthusiasm. This enthusiasm, in turn, evoked images.
Georgia Kampani reworked, by choice, some of her earlier works with pencil, crayons, Chinese ink, and tempera on paper, from 1975 to 1990, adding to them her new production. Her works always display meticulous design and harmonious colors. Her compositions move within the atmosphere of a symbolic idiom. Anthropocentric, Kampani occasionally inserts smaller-scale forms, with unexpectedly inverted perspective, ecstatic in the face of the mystery that surrounds them. Her diminutive figures, more like types, seem to bear the weight of their questions with anxiety, expressing her metaphysical concerns.
Certainly, even in this anthology, the painter did not want to create a simple illustration of the poems, nor do ideologies of a conservative tendency seem to dominate in her images, as they do in similar attempts. She expresses her strong personal sentiment, her pure emotion, as it emerges from the atmosphere of the poems themselves.
Dimitris Pavlopoulos,
Lecturer of Art History,
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Athens