A girl grows up in Athens during the civil war.  She remembers men slithering along walls, hushed conversations on street corners.  Some time later, a girl of seven or eight, she is consumed by a desire to draw.  She draws on every surface imaginable.  The phone box at home is re-painted once a month, and is at once covered again with designs.

I got to know Marina Karella gradually, through the years, as a friend of my parents, someone who was always gracious, cultured, and, it struck me, knew how to live:  giving meaning to “the good life,” that is, to see a Socratic meaning, where “good” and “beautiful” are synonymous, but also that the good life is the examined — or in Marina’s case — the fully sensed life. 

At a certain point in the mid 1980s, it became my fortune to work as Marina’s studio assistant in New York, and it struck me again how dynamic Marina’s life was, how she could be focused on her work, but she never lost sight of — in fact was, and is, viscerally connected to — those close to her.  She was different.  She was the only person I knew who turned off her answering machine when she was out and only turned it on when she was in the studio, so that she could instantly interrupt her work to take an essential call from family or friend.

Though she has been making paintings and sculpture professionally since the 1970s and has shown her work in galleries in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere, Marina’s art continues to be a rarified pleasure. This is partially due too to the fact that Marina’s interests are not mainstream: she is not a formalist, nor is she concerned with social issues.  Rather, her imagery and the effects of her textures tend to be ethereal, and there is an element of mysticism as well.  Some of this, I believe, can be traced to her Greek roots.

Karella’s parents had an art collection, which included Monet, De Nitis, and Guillaumin.  “My father did have a very good eye for paintings,” Karella remembers.  “He had a few things of value, and we lived with them.”   Also significant was a year spent in New York and South Carolina, when she was a child.   As the artist remembers, “That influenced me in the sense of painting because there was such a difference between the artistic climate of a Greek school and an American school — the way they encouraged you and put your paintings on the wall.  You felt you were a genius at the age of seven!” Living in the States also opened up Karella’s viewpoints in terms of popular culture and what could constitute a serious work of art. 

Karella achieved early success designing sets and costumes for the theater.  It is not surprising that she would have an understanding of clothing when one considers that her father and grandfather both worked with fabrics.   Her grandfather was from the Peloponnese and created a fashion trend by printing colored flowers on the headscarves he made.  He had the first textile factory in Syra in the Cyclades.  His son — Karella’s father — manufactured clothing materials. 

Karella’s older brother, Alexander, introduced her to opera.  “Music came from my brother,” she explains, “and I had a German nanny, who took me to all the concerts possible when I was 10 or 11.  My brother loved to sing.  He was a singer basically.  He wanted to go into theater, but at the time it was not considered the right thing to do, so he didn’t.”  It was Alexander who knew the artist Yiannis Tsarouchis.  “I always used to draw,” Karella says, “all the time, all the time.  So at one point Alexander liked what I was doing, and he took my sketches to Tsarouchis, who was the biggest Greek painter at the time.  I must have been about 15.”

Tsarouchis embodied the myth of the Romantic artist.  He scandalized bourgeois morality, made the de rigeur pilgrimage to Paris, where he met Giacometti, and — in his eyes and the eyes of his admirers — transformed Greek art in a way that wasn’t immediately understood.  Tsarouchis was a classicist as well, steeped in ancient Greek literature and thought.  Although he worked in a variety of styles, he is best known for his portraits of soldiers and sailors, and for introducing traditional Greek types into a somewhat modern context.  Tsarouchis had a brief professional relationship with Iolas, Karella’s future dealer, but it was in the world of theater and opera that he may have achieved his most important work, doing stage and costume design for the Dallas Civic Opera, Covent Garden, and working with Maria Callas and Jon Vickers, among others, at Epidaurus and La Scala.

Tsarouchis also made a lasting impression on several generations of young Greek artists.  He was a popular lecturer, with a devoted following.  Some of his quotes, from interviews with the journalist Haris Livas, give an idea of his intelligence and aesthetics: “I have never thought of myself as being an artist and I still don’t believe it, even though I have been painting since I was six years old… I feel that Greece is neither East nor West… [T]here are Greek artists, especially in poetry, who have made a good marriage of both: Elytis, Seferis, Solomos, Halepas.  Both East and West are inside me.  Unfortunately, many others prefer only to drag Europe here.”   The idea of looking beyond the Western tradition — while being firmly based in anthropocentric Greek philiosophy — would come to have a profound effect on Karella’s later work.

Karella was drawn to Tsarouchis’ charismatic fire, and he at once proposed that she study with him.  As she describes this formative experience, it is one in which life and art were inextricably intertwined, as were intellectual pursuit and romantic passion:  “After school, I used to go and hang around his studio.  He had a face like Socrates, and he had these sayings.  He would never sit at a desk to speak to you.  You would just be in his studio, and the most amazing Brazilian artists would come and dance, and then he’d play Greek folkloric music.”  There were no exercises and no entourage, just Tsarouchis, Karella, and one or two other students.  “It was very much one on one with him,” she remembers.  “He gave me things he needed to have done.  I was like an assistant, an apprentice.  Sometimes I had to cook his rice and sweet peas!  But he was very wise — he had an amazing knowledge of Greek tragedy, of opera.  He transmitted his values, but like that — they were in the air.”  Karella’s first taste of big-time theater was the production of Norma at Epidauros in 1958, featuring Maria Callas.   Tsarouchis was doing the sets and costumes, and Karella got to observe first hand and assist on the production.

Karella’s next collaboration with a professional artist was also in the theater.  After finishing school, she was attending the Tetsi-Vakalo art school in Athens, when the famous actor Taki Horn, a friend of her parents’, wandered into her room and saw her work on the wall.  “Show me what you’re doing,” he said.  She showed him, and he said, “Okay.  I commission you to do the costumes for my next play.”   She was only 19 and told him, “Taki, you must be out of your mind.  I’m just Tsarouchis’ pupil, and I go to art school.  I don’t think I could do it.”  Horn replied, “Look.  In life, either you take the chances, or you let them go by.”  So she took him up on his offer.

The first decor she did for Horn was influenced by Tsarouchis, but it pleased Horn, and he asked her to work with him again.  The third time, it was to do the sets and costumes for Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and this time the design was integral to the play’s success.  Karella evoked the world inside the madman’s head by pasting many pieces of cigarette paper on a huge silver backdrop.  She was 20, and from that time on, she was a professional designer, doing major productions in Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and elsewhere.  Even later, when she made the decision to concentrate on her work as a visual artist, offers would arise for productions, and she would take some of them.  By the time she was 24, she had done sets and costumes for plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, Molière, and Cocteau, and had designed a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the National Theater of Greece.

In the early 1960s, Marina advanced her knowledge of visual art techniques through studies with Oskar Kokoschka at his summer school in Salzburg and studies at the Beaux Arts in Paris from 1962  to 1964.  The key meeting in her life, though, one that would ultimately change its course, leading her away from Greece, which, despite its attractions, places certain limitations on anyone wishing to be a contemporary artist, and drawing her towards Paris and New York, was her meeting with and marriage to Prince Michael of Greece.  Michael is an historian, who has written books on portraiture and ghosts, among many other topics, and through him, Karella was soon introduced to a world of varied cultural influences.  They married in 1965 and moved to Paris in 1975.  In the intervening decade, much changed for Marina.  She met the dealer Alexander Iolas, a flamboyant figure who had once been a dancer with the Diaghilev ballet and who later had been instrumental in helping build the de Menil collection of works by Max Ernst and other artists.  In the 1960s, Iolas had galleries in Paris and New York, where he showed Jean Tinguley, Niki de St. Phalle, Paul Thek, Pino Pascali, Harold Stevenson, and others.  Karella credits the dealer for encouraging her to take her work more seriously, to be critical, embracing aspects of it while rejecting others.  It was Iolas who introduced Niki de St. Phalle to Marina.  This friendship would have major repercussions for Karella, both on the personal and professional planes. 

Some of Karella’s earliest paintings used friends, many of them artists, as subjects.  There is the sense in these works that she is depicting beauty itself.  The presentation of the figure and graphic impact in a work like Sophia’s Shadow, 1972, are reminiscent of fashion photography.  Karella’s own photographs have been published in magazines about style, including Issue, at the request of photographer Jack Pierson.  The ways beauty and glamour are portrayed in the fashion world are never far below the surfaces of Karella’s portraits.  I wonder what Marina has to say about “beautiful people” in her work.  “That’s where I imagine I’m influenced very much by the Greek tradition,” she begins.  “The depiction of beauty in sculptures in classical Greece has definitely affected me all through my life.  Somehow though, a beautiful interior makes someone beautiful.  The people are real but idealized.  I chose people that suited me, but then most young people are beautiful.”

While many of Karella’s earliest paintings were portraits, they were generalized.  In a fashion that would become typical for her, they are simultaneously portraits and not portraits, just as when she paints interiors, they are interiors with other elements included.  In addition to her fascination with materials, already evident in her late 1960s work, and her desire to treat each work as a separate entity, there is often an over-arching sense of the mysterious, an air with which Karella imbues her works that connects it to various histories — ancient and contemporary — and also leaves the work inexplicable, aloof.

From the early figures on, Karella has frequently used photography as part of her creative process.  She does not treat the camera as a device to see with — her images do not have a photographically produced feeling to them.  Rather, she uses the camera to get ideas for composition and perhaps gesture.  With those suggestions in hand, she sets the camera aside and constructs the image with the manual means at her disposal.  Karella is particularly sensitive to the qualities of media, and she will make definite decisions as to which medium she wishes to work in at a given time.  Her description of an early photo session for a painting indicates the persistence of a sense of theater that lies behind her two- and three-dimensional work:
I’ve been taking photographs all along, because I use them for my work, for the painting. I start with an idea, then I like to photograph the idea.  I made one huge painting of a march on the beach.  So I went down to the beach in Greece with three or four friends of mine helping me, and assistants, with bicycles, huge beds, draperies, wheelbarrows, chairs, armchairs, and made a whole huge procession of these on the beach!  And I took photos of them, which I used to make drawings, and from these drawings I made a huge white painting.  From the 1970s on, that’s been my way of working.  The new ways of materials give me fresh starts.  I always make my mise-en-scène by the sea.

In the mid-1970s, Karella moved into her first signature style — large oil paintings of figures in situations dominated by what appear to be white sheets.  The figures may be standing or lying, completely visible or partially shrouded, awake or in some state of semi- or unconsciousness.  The settings are not realistic; the sheets can take on characteristics of rocky landscape or water.  There is a shifting back and forth in the consciousness of the viewer when confronting these works; they do not allow the mind to settle into one interpretation, but encourage it to travel outward to ever different possibilities.  Mainly, though, these paintings haunt the viewer because of their evanescence, achieved through the technique Karella devised to make the figures seem on the verge of disappearing into a completely white environment.

Karella’s use of shrouding leads to different interpretations — it can be the shrouding of a dead person, it can have an angelic air, depicting the spirit, and some of them are quite erotic, particularly where the face is covered and part of the body is revealed.  Different ideas come and go, and the work is not dogmatic.  Partially, too, Karella’s sheets hark back to the “winding sheet” in Aischylos’ Oresteia trilogy.  The queen Klytaimestra and her lover Aigisthos catch the returned king in a sheet, while he is taking a bath, before murdering him.   And suddenly, it goes back to being the modern bed sheet.  It’s as if the fabric becomes a character in Karella’s paintings.

The people in the white paintings are contemporary in their clothing and hairstyles.  In the painting The Myth/Mythical White/Troubled Waters, 1976,  the setting can be a landscape and also a bed with sheets; rectilinear lines can feel like windows or doorways.  “It’s between a bed and a landscape,” says Karella.  “I use the sheet as a pictorial means, but it also has a symbolic value.  We’re born in sheets, we make love in sheets, we die in sheets.  It’s a little bit like the mother, and then there are these young men.” 

In 1977, Karella had her first show in New York, at the gallery Brooks Jackson/Iolas.  Barbara Zucker wrote about the show in ARTnews, “In her first one-woman show in the United States, Karella exhibited six canvases.  Her figurative images are surreal and rendered with photographic clarity.  Her presences are like static, contemporary totems.  The paintings themselves are almost invisible; that is, they have a silvery white, glossy surface which makes the subject hard to see.  … The two largest paintings are made of five sections, the central being the biggest.  … a potpourri of mixed metaphors here; one isn’t sure if the scene is religious, if the ‘queen’ is a devouring Jungian figure, or if she is being ignored in the men’s preference for each other.  [In another painting] The ‘ice queen’ lies en déshabillée on the bed (whose wrinkled sheets run like water), either sated or wounded.  The drapery with which the artist covers her figures or objects is obviously classical in style, and relates to Greek drama.”

Critically, and interestingly, Karella did not make completely white paintings; she is more interested in the intersection between being and non-being, and for that she needs the human or natural form, or some sign of them.  Also, while the 1970s could be called “the white decade,” Karella must have wanted to distance herself from such predecessors in white painting as Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Ryman.  The former did a series of all-white paintings while still a student at Black Mountain College that John Cage credited with giving him the courage to devise his composition 4’33”, in which the pianist sits without playing for the time indicated.  One of those early Rauschenbergs is in five vertical panels, and it shares with Karella’s five-panel sheet painting a kind of spiritual calm.  The vertical panels in both paintings give them an aspirational quality that Rauschenberg’s white paintings in square formats don’t share in quite the same way.

To gain a fuller understanding of Karella’s art, it is necessary to consider it not only in terms of contemporary art history but also to consider the Greek influences in Karella’s background, the Turkish and Asian influences.  The whites of which she is so fond are not only the whites of bright Mediterranean light, but also the whites that island homes get painted.  Her series of altars has a connection to Byzantine altarpieces with their saints depicted on painted wooden panels.  “I feel those influences since I was a child growing up in Greece,” Karella admits.  “I made a whole series of cafés that are dark, and that comes from what I saw all my life, going through the countryside in Greece.  You see the men in the cafés, and the women stay at home.  There’s a tremendous atmosphere, because that’s the only possibility they have to get together and have party time.  I’ve seen it all my life and felt it all my life.”

It is informative, when thinking about Karella’s accomplishments and interests, to consider the work of two other Greek-born artists, both of whom moved to the United States at an early age — Stephen Antonakos and Lucas Samaras.  Antonakos, Karella, and Samaras all work in sculpture, and all three use surfaces that seem rooted in a Greek experience.  Samaras’ sculptures that are composed of countless shiny surfaces — buttons, marbles, rhinestones — and Antonakos’ gold leaf paintings with neon share an affinity with Karella’s use of gold that may be said to have its origins in Byzantine art.  Antonakos, who began his career working purely within a purely Modernist framework, albeit a sensual one, mainly in neon sculptures, has, in recent years, introduced an increasingly spiritual element to his work, even designing several small chapels.  Antonakos’ combination of modern neon with ancient gold finds its place in a modern art that accesses history in a sensitive way.  The same could be said of many of Karella’s sculptures.  The influence of New York, in particular, and the history of modern art have been profound on all three artists, yet all three feel the need to reflect their different heritages, and they do so in ways that remain unresolvable to simple historical formulae.

Of course, it is not only Marina’s own culture that has interested her but the idea, as hinted at by Tsarouchis, of bringing elements together from East and West, seeing Greece as a nodal point between two different ways of experiencing the world.  A trip to India made a powerful impact on Marina.  She did a series of works using found Indian images, which she modified, but more than that, the trip opened her up to a religious experience distinct from that with which she was familiar.  She sees Christian mysticism as being expressed in images of purity and light, whereas what she saw of Hindu mythology often made use of chaos and darkness.  To me, it has to do with the difference between monotheistic belief, which will always stress a binary opposition of good versus evil, light versus dark, and a polytheistic one, which will tend to have all the human propensities represented by beings who are in a hierarchy but maintain a relative equality among them.

                                    *                        *                        *

Eventually, in my work, just before we left for New York, I started doing “portraits” of chairs.  That was in 1974, ’75.  And that’s when, all of a sudden, I started to need the third dimension, and I did my first sculpture.  It took me a year to do figure out how to do it.  It was so complicated, a bronze.  I didn’t know what material to do it in, and Iolas said, “My dear, you have to do it in polished bronze, because the one thing will reflect itself into another, and it will make it much more immaterial.”

This is Marina describing her push into sculpture, which seems so natural when one thinks of her background in the theater, yet she waited several years before attempting it.  Now sculpture has become a major part of her artistic focus.  The first ones she did were in white cast polyester, painted with oils.  Then she began working in bronze as well.  From that point on, materials could vary according to her pictorial need.  Some are directly related to Cycladic figures, which have inspired Giacometti, among others.  Brancusi comes to mind when viewing Marina’s stacked sculptures, albeit her forms have a more directly biomorphic effect.  She has worked with drapery in sculpture, transferring an abiding interest from the paintings.  In the 1980s, she worked extensively in marble, manipulating expectations by creating illusions of liquid and fabric.  Many of her sculptural images have to do with emptiness, for instance clothing which is empty of a body but full of the energy of one’s having been there. 

Marina and Michael moved to New York in 1979 and stayed for 14 years.  They went at the time when New York was experiencing a revival, coming out of the doldrums of the Modernist endgame, with its abandonment of one after another tradition — the figure, the image, the painting, then the physical work itself — and its concomitant attack on art as commodity, coupled with the attempt to take art beyond the gallery and museum settings.  This was a rich period intellectually and socially, but it also indicated a point after which there is simply nothing.  This tension was resolved by a generation of young artists who were unconstrained by the ideals of their predecessors and revivified many of the traditions that had recently been jettisoned.  New York was the center of this rebirth, and a mix of American and foreign artists soon became an essential part of the world in which Marina moved.  James Brown, Francesco Clemente, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers and Rob Wynne are among the figures with whom she now became close, both personally and artistically, in the sense of seeing their work and being inspired by it. 

“What happened in New York,” she says, “was that I found that lots of things came to me.  The ideas didn’t necessarily come from New York, but it was the place to be able to realize them, because of the energy there.  New York was wonderful because you just did things.  It could also be rather difficult; when we first arrived, there was so much color, it was overwhelming.”  Marina did not change as a result of this new life — she did not become a New York artist in that sense — but her New York life certainly freed her to see things differently.  It also made her think more deeply about her European heritage. 

“Then from the sculptural waterfalls,” she says, “I went into the Greek period of cafes in oil paintings.   It was in New York that I felt the urge to do them.” There were three series: Café des Deux Garçons, A Place Before Dawn, and Around Time.  To my mind, this body of work is Marina’s most remarkable to date. 

Karella had been working toward these paintings in the late 1980s, with a series of canvases that take interiors as their subjects.  Often depicting set tables and undefined spaces receding into the darkness, these paintings have a somber quality which stands in contrast to her 1970s drapery paintings.  Where those were almost white, ethereal, and had human figures, the 1980s paintings are dark, largely figureless, and seem to access a different, and not innoucuous, spiritual zone.  One could say these works find a parallel in contemporary paintings by the abstract painter Ross Bleckner.  Both artists have a gift for painting indistinct edges, making shapes that seem to glow in space.  Thematically, Bleckner chanelled feelings of loss as a result of the AIDS tragedy that became paramount in that period, taking lives of many artists and others intimately connected to the art world.  The candles in Karella’s paintings are like votive candles and also flames of spirits continuing to burn in the darkness.  In one painting, No Ordinary Light, 1988, a lighted doorway in a dim expanse seems to suggest a pathway to a different world.

Karella’s work can be said to change with two 1994 paintings, Daybreak and Dusk.  The paintings are the same size and were conceived as a pair.  They are parallel in construction, with rocky foregrounds giving way to bays on which twinkle the light of coming or dying day, bounded at top by a strip of sky and a looming landmass.  They could not in reality take precisely the same view, as the rising and setting suns must be seen in opposite directions, but we know not to be so literal-minded in front of Marina’s pictures.  What captures us instead is her deftness with the points of light dancing on water, and we take the parallel images as complementary moods more than literal depictions.

In 1995, Karella painted her Café les Deux Garçons series, in which her formal inventiveness expanded.  Her formats became a little squarer, at once removing some of the overt “spirituality” from the work and also enabling her compositions to function better horizontally as well as vertically.  At the same time, the subjects became less easily defined, and she began to combine disparate elements in a single picture.  While the café motif is clearly present, with its tables and electric lighting, there is the addition of elements that are either exteriors — bodies of water or vegetation — or simply cannot be described.  The result is a fantasy that exceeds the imagination, a boldness of invention that exhilarates the mind.  Karella’s paintings also became more sophisticated coloristically in this series.  Whereas before she limited herself to “pure” tones, or in the sculptures the powerful hues of gold and an Yves Klein blue, in these paintings she adventurously shifts from mustard yellow to a grassy green to the burnt crimsons of a summer sunset. 

A Place Before Dawn, 1996, is a polyptych of fifteen panels put together to make a large rectangle.  Each panel is its own picture, and the connections between them are fortuitous.  The interiors depicted in these panels feature, as Karella puts it, “a bed that is not a bed.   It is again exterior and interior.  It can be a landscape, but at the same time it’s the chandelier of a café.  A Place Before Dawn is like a resume of all the themes put it one — the cafés, the interiors, exteriors, drapery.”

The painting cycle Around Time, 1998, is based on a photograph by Robert Doisneau of an abandoned carousel.  In Marina’s treatment, foreground and background meld together, and the carousel seems empty because it is apart from normal time.  You could call it a dream, but it seems even more powerful than that, a shocking, primal experience, a kind of hallucination, or vision, effected by the artist through her masterful paint handling.  Whereas in the white sheet paintings, she was able to create a compelling object, now the actual painting is much more subtle, the spaces, imaginary though they may be, more expertly evinced. The space is interesting and feels real; it is carefully worked out.  She does not always do drawings to work out those dimensions.  She does start from photographs, as usual, but then she adds to and subtracts from the photograph.  As she puts it, “The painting is a made-up situation.  It’s based on a photograph, but then other elements are put in — the landscaping to it.  When I start the painting, I have drawings, the idea, the maquette, the colors, but doing the painting I transform it.  I work very quickly, but I do four to five paintings at the same time, and they take me a month.”

From the landscapes in the paintings has arisen a recent project of nature drawings and paintings.  “These flowers came out of the white flowers as a contradiction to the Indian images,” says Karella.  “I went into a garden phase.  These are big close-ups of flowers and gardens, but with millions of things happening in them, stories.  They are oriental gardens and Greek gardens.  They’re about people being there and not being there.  These are all empty.”  They are watercolors that have an unusual richness because of the wax Karella applies to her painted surfaces.   Watercolor has been the locus, too, of Karella’s other recent experiment, an extensive series of portraits.  These she does in sections; in other words, a person’s head, torso, and legs might each appear on separate sheets of paper, which are then installed stepwise to create a complete figure.  Working in this way, Karella accentuates the materiality of her medium, giving it a sculptural presence.  Watercolor encourages the artist to get done what she wants to get done right away.  To work under this constraint was a departure for Karella and part of a conscious decision she made to take a break from oil painting. 

Marina's journey from the little girl drawing on her parents’ walls to the complex, exciting life she enjoys today is one that is almost mythic in its scope.  I feel that is because Marina is sensitive to the possibility of myth in our daily lives.  She believes in it, and because she believes in it, she finds it — for herself and for us, her friends and fans.  Marina is a remarkable artist, who has cut a unique path through the many mediums in which she has worked.  Her technical prowess has increased through the years, and her paintings now are on a very high level.  I hope that her art will find the much larger audience it deserves.  Whatever may happen is part of the celestial mystery Marina’s work helps us to define.

I wish to end this meditation on the work and life of my friend with three quotations.  The first is by the artist herself:
My art comes from not really defining and being able to make my own resume of whatever I am seeing, not telling myself exactly what I am seeing.  I don’t want to know very clearly what I see.  I want to be able to dream its clarity.  I have the elements, and I want to make my own clarity of it.  It can be about the moment right now or not.  Are you looking at it in reality?   Are you looking at it in a dream?   Is something going to happen?   Did it happen?   For me, those are the important elements of it. 

The second comes from a short note written to Marina by her good friend, the artist Niki de St. Phalle:

“What will visibly
remain when we are gone?
The chairs we sat in?  The
table in which we sat
drinking Ouzo that day when
the light enveloped us?”

And the last quote comes across the eternal waters of the Aegean, where the poetry of Hesiod feels like it was composed yesterday.  This is from the poetry of George Seferis, the Greek poet who won the Nobel prize for literature and was much admired by Eliot.  He could be speaking of my friend:
“Again with the spring
She wore light colours
With a weightless walking
Again with the spring
Again with the summer
She was smiling.”