Statement If I pick a rose and experience its beauty, I can sense an essence so vast that it opens a universe to me. If I surround myself with foliage, the waters and sky, and experience their vastness and sublimity, I can sense their precious growth and movement in a blade of grass, in a droplet of water or in a patch of sky. If I accept the many and opposite aspects of my nature and experience them as complementary components of my whole being, I may then sense freedom. I paint about such general ideas and I clothe them in colours and textures that seem to me as beautiful as a rose. I embed them in forms that have a sense of becoming and growing as do the forms in Nature and I unfold and unveil spaces as if to search for underlying truths and essences. That is to say, my colours, textures, forms and spaces are not just metaphors or representations of a real world, they are a real world. A world in which non-materiality and materiality, mind and body, co-exist. The process of unconcealing the contents of this world is the essence of my art. It is an unconcealing of the spiritual in the aesthetic, an embodiment of soul in colour, texture and transparency. It is a Zen of painting in which the contemplative act distils an essence about ones' total reality. The act of painting becomes a lyrical dance efflorescing a painting as an evolution of a meditative and tactile experience with the colour and materiality of the paint. Abstraction and philosophy provide the fundamental basis for my work. I find the quality of the abstract in a blade of grass, in a droplet of water, in each breath of air. Abstraction suggests the poetic. It is a way of presenting without representing; for not all painting is representation and not all art is a product of conceptualism alone. Abstraction is a presentation on canvas of qualities which would otherwise be non-specifiable in a verbal language and unpresentable in a more representational visual language. Abstraction is an attitude to life in which the mind and body, thinking and practice, are inter-linked...And so, the language which I use is abstract because the subject matter is real. The communication between the art work and viewer is a product of perception, conception and the sense of the aesthetic. But, it is in the quality of the aesthetic, arising out of the experience of being with the painting, which enables the art work to communicate directly with the viewer. Athina Pazolli April 1997