Showing posts with label isle of lesbos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label isle of lesbos. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

The poet Sappho and her lyre from Lydia


This is my newest painting of the poet Sappho from the isle of Lesbos and her magic lyre from Lydia (the actual Turkey)

Monday, June 3, 2019

My acrylics on canvas painting of Abanthis playing lyre for Gongyla



Please Abanthis your Sappho calls you:
Won't you take your Lydian lyre and play
Another song to Gongyla while desire still
flutters your heart-strings

for that girl, that beautiful girl: her dresses
clinging makes you shake when you see it, and i'm
happy for the goddess herself once blamed me
Our Lady of Cyprus

This poem written by Sappho has inspired me to make some pencil drawings and the painting above

You can watch me painting in the video below

Sunday, August 13, 2017

A girl form Sappho's thaissos on the isle of Lesbos singing

This is my painting of a girl from Sappho's thaissos on the isle of Lesbos, wearing a soft white dress and flowers in her hair, singing next to the Aegean sea, the way I imagine her. Young girls in Sappho's school were singinf, dancing, writing poems, beiing helped to develop their feminine and artistic sides. These girls were priestesses of Aphrodite and they were singing about love, beauty and the feminine in it's essence.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

A girl from Sappho's thaissos playing harp on the isle of Lesbos, next to the sea


I've made this thinking about one of the girls the poet Sappho used to teach the art of femininity, imagining she is there, on the isle of Lesbos, next to the Aegean sea, wearing a simple white dress and a violet and rose tiara, singing about love with a harp, her divine voice and inspiration from Aphrodite, singing like a mermaid, hoping someone will hear her over the seas.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

To Atthis, a poem written by Sappho and two ball point pen drawings



These drawings are about the sad story of a girl who had to leave Sappho's thaissos to marry a man who was living somewhere in Sardis. Even if she was shining among the Lydian women she was not happy. She was missing Atthis and the life they shared at Sappho's Thaissos.

To Atthis
Though in Sardis now,
she things of us constantly
and of the life we shared.
She saw you as a goddess
and above all your dancing gave her deep joy.
Now she shines among Lydian women like
the rose-fingered moon
rising after sundown, erasing all
stars around her, and pouring light equally
across the salt sea
and over densely flowered fields
lucent under dew. Her light spreads
on roses and tender thyme
and the blooming honey-lotus.
Often while she wanders she remem-
bers you, gentle Atthis,
and desire eats away at her heart
for us to come.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Sappho and the girl who had to leave the isle of Lesbos


Sappho and one of her muses, in the sad moment when the girl had to leave against her will, acrylics on canvas painting.
The poem below has inspired me

I have had not one word from her

Frankly I wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept

a great deal; she said to
me, ``This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.''

I said, ``Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love

``If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared

``all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck

``myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them

``while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song...''

Sappho

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Friday, November 14, 2014

My drawings and paintings of the poet Sappho and some words about the censorship of her poems


Sappho and Gongyla, acrylics on canvas painting
These are mai painting of the poet Sappho from the Isle of Lesbos. I don't know if she was really homosexual but she was a great poet, a feminist and a sensitive artist. She loved beauty in all of it's forms, the beauty of nature, flowers and young girls. Unfortunately most of her creations have been destroyed by the misogyny christians that followed her. This christians, especially the orthodox christians in the eastern europe, acted and keep acting like talibans.
Sappho's poems were not about pornography and perversions. Sappho's poems were just about feminity, beauty and pure love, but they were destroyed be cause they have been written by a woman and this would contradict the text written by Saul (known as Saint Paul), a frustrated gay man in denial who hated gay men and all women be cause he could not accept himself. This Saul wrote that women are inferior and should not be allowed to be leaders of opinion, write and teach others. 
Even the muslims were influenced by this frustrated man, islam being a branch that emerged later from the common stem of the abrahamic religions. All the abrahamic religions are characterised by misogynism and a conservative and intolerant attitude and have pulled humanity and civilisation backwards.
As I said before it's a pity a lot of creations, including Sappho's poems, have been lost because christians have destroyed them, like they did with Alexandria library. 
Abrahamic religions have always been the worst enemy of both arts and science and without them we would have been far in space, reaching distant planets, without them.
There were times when people were killed be cause the had the courage to say the Earth is just a sphere rotating around the sun. 
Scientists were killed, artworks were destroyed and wars were made in the name of a religion that claims to be the religion of love, peace and wisdom. 
How can you talk abot love while you promote hate and intolerance? How can you talk about wisdom while you burn books and kill people just be cause they dare to tell the scientific truth contradicting the bible? Hou can you talk about peace while you make war "in the name of God"?
I's sad there are so many places in this world were people still follow abrahamic doctrine instead of knowing the scientific truth.



Saturday, March 31, 2012

Sappho and Gongyla

This is my balpoint pen drawing of the poet Sappho and Gongyla, one of her girlfriends.
I have a tempera painting too.


This is the poem Sappho wrote for Gongyla, the poem that inspired me.
Please

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.