Art today at my blog... A business meeting at my office offered me the opportunity to meet Mr. Athanasios Diamantopoulos a well known Greek artist and one of the most important representatives of the expressionism in Greece . He is a graphic artist and creative director of a company which keeps a leading role at the world of printing industry.

During the meeting we talked about art and when he learned that I am also a graphic artist and art lover he invited me at the place that he exhibited part of his art. So...after a few days... a Saturday evening, we arranged the meeting at the exhibition place which was a large hotel at the area of Eleftherios Venizelos airport. Despina, my daughter was also interested to meet Mr. Diamantopoulos and she accepted immediately my proposition for a evening with art.

Expessionism is a term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.

Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.

The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany , the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

With an incomparable pleasure, he passes from brush-paint in to canvas to constructed creations. The two aforementioned figures appear in his art-area with special emphasis on different materials that his creations have been constructed from.

Polymorphian is his major characteristic. The direct diathesis on expressionism enables the observer to "interfere" and "watch" what suits him/her best, in order to achieve an interactive, pictorial and visual relationship with the artist. He vary rarely repeats his creations and very easily gives birth to new and "fresh" ideas.

The strangeness derives from past and provides inspiration and motivation for new discoveries. The final outcome ties in and completes the erotic relationship between the observer and the artist.

The most impressive part of Diamantopoulos collages are his boats. Each one of them was a travel... a travel of the mind at the ocean of my emotions.

This part of the artist's work offers me calm. Those boats sails at the sky and as they pass from cloud to cloud a new dream is created and warm colors fill the atmosphere.

We talked also about a new form of art... the art of bloging. Mr. Diamantopoulos is not familiar with our world but he agrees with me. It is a way to create art at our ages. We exchange thoughts and feelings with the most amazing way... mixing different elements like text photos, pictures, video and sound.

It was a nice Saturday afternoon and we had the pleasure to share it with a great artist and his expressionist art.