REAL NEWS/REAL TIME - Nothing can stop me...I am free!
Athens became the crossroad where two women from different countries bridge art and friendship. Two extremely accomplished artists, Mina Papatheodorou Valyrakis and the American Artist B’ Beth Weldon meet each other with a common exhibition in Greece named “Women Bridging Worlds” at the Ikastikos Kiklos Sianti Gallery.
Mina Papatheodorou loves motion, tension, and colour. Her paintings express the beauty of the speed, the power and the shifting. They are aggressive and provocative; they reflect on the canvas her passionate temperament.
B’ Beth Weldon lives and works in Fairhope,Alabama. Her paintings have a personal abstractive artistic mark, with colour being the main element. “Whether I use a paintbrush, a knife, or a pencil I introduce certain elements into each work: characteristic lines, freedom of movement in a gestural manner and rich colours in order to give life to my themes as well as my abstract forms” she said.
Occasioned by this meeting, Mina Papatheodorou-Valyraki speaks about the connection with her artistic route and the path of B’Beth’s, about things that touch her emotions as well as the information her paintings reveal about her personality.
- What is your connection with B’Beth Weldon?
We are connected through the American Sport Art Museum and Archives (ASAMA) and the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Al. We both have paintings in ASAMA. Moreover, we are both members of the Art Committee Board for the USA Sports Academy. But, beyond this, I love her work. Just like my own work, it tends to be abstractive, but it always has a theme, with bridges, intersection. Likewise her own work shares the same vocabulary. Besides, I am an artist as well. I do not do decorative works. This is why I decided to have a joint-exhibition with B’Beth in Greece.
-Do you need to speak the same artistic language in order to co-exist?
You cannot prepare an exhibition and not have a common artistic vocabulary. Painting is a language unto itself. You communicate, you do not have to speak.
- Are the paintings presented in this exhibition derived from the usual theme environment?
I exhibit new paintings, from the past two years, from the theme area with bridges and cranes, but they are not the old ones. They are new pursuits, with a different range, with more tension, different colours. B’ Beth exhibits her work with diagonals, colors and neutrals. I also exhibit for the first time metals, which I have used to create various perforated/pierced compositions (they were at the Miami Basel of Joanne Coya.) They are integrated to what I call in Italian “penetrabile”, permeable. It is a structure that passes through the viewer.
(Partial translation of Greek article REAL NEWS/REAL TIME.)
