Education Woven with Heritage

Sophia Savalas received training in San Francisco art schools during the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. She continued schooling through San Jose City College, and further received a B.A. in Art and Psychology from University Without Walls in San Francisco, and a M.A. in Art and Psychology from Goddard College in 1982. She studied art with Vladislav Andreyev, a Russian Icon Master, and with the prominent San Jose, CA, artists Luis Gutierrez, Lynn and Harry Powers, and Gay Schy.

During her time of painting, Sophia also worked for twenty years as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Her experience as a therapist gave her a deep empathy for our human condition. Her paintings are infused with a sensitivity of color, shape, and heart that invite us not just to look but to go within and reflect.

Savalas’ self-study and training in art actually began as a child at her family’s farm compound on Long Island, N.Y.  Sophia was a first generation Greek-American who was born into a family whose legacy of theatre and poetry is centuries old. Savalas believed our earliest memories and recollections of smells, sights, touches, sounds, and tastes shape and inspire our present experiences.

Her Uncle Theodore, who painted Byzantine icons in his art studio on this farm, played a pivotal role in Sophia’s beginning her life study in art. The Savalas clan of artists, bakers, thespians, and self-proclaimed philosophers encircled Theo’s studio. The smells of oil paint, myrrh, coffee, baked breads and pastries, Greek wine, cigars and garlic infused his studio.

The sounds of Greek America in the 1940’s encapsulated this moment in time.  Stories rung upon stories, woven thick with jokes and classic mythology. All were orchestrated to be both reverent and raucous as the family strove to keep alive their heritage and eccentricities. Until school age, Savalas actually believed that all people, cultures, and races were the many-faceted tribes and descendants of Greeks.

Her comedic and thespian father, Dimitri, exhorted anyone who’d listen to accept that the true root source of this world and the universe was Greece. Because Greece is geographically small, he proclaimed, Greeks had to spread out to Asia, Africa, etc. All Creation Myths could, therefore, be traced to Mt. Olympus and the “Originals”.  Thus, through Dimitri’s extreme creative license Savalas was given to see her world as multi-connected and cross-ethnic.

As her ancestors, grandfather and uncle, once used egg tempera and gold leaf, she also uses this ancient method in her smaller iconic work. In her panels and structures, Savalas works with mixed media of oil, collage, dry pigment, metals, plaster and found objects. The focus of her work is inspired and rooted in Greek Mythology as a source of her unique contemporary visual expression. Her paintings symbolically evoke the trials of the aspiring human soul in quest of a deeper understanding of life’s cycles, challenges, and mysteries.