The Poetic Underpinnings of My Seascapes

“On an artistic note, Samos also became the muse from whom I garnered inspiration for my seascapes, and also for some mermaid paintings. Gauguin had Tahiti, Cezanne had Mont Saint-Victoire, I have Samos! And however many times I paint the mountain of Mycale (or “The Camel,” as the Samians call it, which is actually part of the Turkish coast where it is called Samsun Daği, or “Samson’s Mountain), each version is different. Light effects, weather conditions, as well as my frame of mind change and influence the creative process. What stays the same, however, is that Mykale marks the meeting point between East and West, where the continent of Europe ends and that of Asia begins.”—Stella Sevastopoulos 

For Art’s Sake

By Stella Sevastopoulos

“The mountains look on Marathon—/And Marathon looks on the sea;/And musing there an hour alone,/I dream’d that Greece might still be free;/For standing on the Persians’ grave,/I could not deem myself a slave.”—George Gordon (Noel) Byron, 6th Baron Byron

“Farewell, farewell! but this I tell/To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!/He prayeth well, who loveth well/Both man and bird and beast./He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small;/For the dear God who loveth us,/He made and loveth all.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

“Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey./Without her you wouldn’t have set out./She has nothing left to give you now./And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you./Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,/you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”—C. P. Cavafy

ATHENS GREECE—(Hubris)—August 2025—A picture is said to evoke a thousand words, but more than a thousand brushstrokes may be involved in its making—a process in which each mark plays its role and is kept, erased, modified, or muted by the painter. The inspiration behind the painting is another story, involving myriad thought-processes and musings eventually filtered through the artistic practice. In my own case, my literary studies often inspire my paintings, including my seascapes, which comprised my recent solo exhibition in Athens. Although I have painted many subjects (abstract works inspired by antiquity, and flower paintings being two of my most common subjects), my seascapes were what caught the eye of Achilleas Tsantilis, Director of Athens’ Tsantilis Art Gallery, and Senior Art Expert of the HAAA (Association of Art Experts of Greece and Cyprus). What follows is a little exploration of the poetics underlying these works.

Three poems in particular influenced the painting pictured above: Byron’s “Isles of Greece” (1819), Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797-8), and Cavafy’s “Ithaka” (1911). In Byron’s poem, the unbridled freedom of the sea inspires in the poet the hope of Greece’s own return to freedom (Byron was writing before the Greek Revolution of 1821). “Where nothing, save the waves and I/May hear our mutual murmurs sweep,” also spoke to me, in terms of that moment of connecting deeply with nature, something which I do too, via my artistic process, especially when painting en plein air. 

In “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge addresses the relationship of man with nature—the interconnectedness of all—and cautions us to respect the Earth and all living things. A single mindless and violent act of hubris committed by the mariner (the shooting of the albatross), leads to a series of catastrophic events and a karmic debt that must be paid. As the scholar of Chaos Theory Edward Norton Lorenz has stated, “[O]ne flap of a sea gulls wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.” At one point in the poem, before balance is restored, all stands still: “Day after day, day after day,/We stuck, nor breath nor motion;/As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean.” The ominous nature of this stillness affected me deeply, and so I painted some works with “a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” inspired by Coleridge.

There is an ecological message in Coleridge’s poem: we must work in harmony with nature, not against it. Ιt is only when the ancient mariner realizes that we must love all creatures that the nature can help him. Byron and Coleridge’s poems reflect the Romantic Movement’s views on nature, and the Romantic Triad, the relationship between nature, spirit, and humanity. To the Romantics, nature is a teacher, a course of study, something mysterious and spiritual, a force to be respected. Many artists have turned to nature for instruction, including Cezanne, who said that “Painting must give us the flavor of nature’s eternity.”

In Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca,” what appeals to me is the idea that the journey is more important than the destination. This again has to do with mindfulness and living in the moment. The Alexandrian poet states that we will not meet monsters along the way, if we do not carry them in our souls, and thus it is our frame of mind which is important as we journey forward. Cavafy often used symbols in his poetry. For me too, the vessels in my works are symbolic: they are like us, traveling across the sea of life. 

As a Diaspora Greek myself, like Cavafy, my life has been colored by my parents’ desire to return to Greece, and especially to the island of their birth, Samos, their paradise on earth. Our family “Ithaka” comprised our trip from London to Samos every summer. My parents’ happiness upon our return to that fertile isle in the North Aegean became a recurring theme in my life, and even when I decided to move to Athens from London (in 1994), that trip to Samos, that return to my family’s roots every summer, still was a necessary journey. 

On an artistic note, Samos also became the muse from whom I garnered inspiration for my seascapes, and also for some mermaid paintings. Gauguin had Tahiti, Cezanne had Mont Saint-Victoire, I have Samos! And however many times I paint the mountain of Mycale (or “The Camel,” as the Samians call it, which is actually part of the Turkish coast where it is called Samsun Daği, or “Samson’s Mountain), each version is different. Light effects, weather conditions, as well as my frame of mind change and influence the creative process. What stays the same, however, is that Mykale marks the meeting point between East and West, where the continent of Europe ends and that of Asia begins. And when “The Camel” turns pink-purple at sunset, it really does seem to be the gateway to a mysterious land, beyond European rationality. 

Some other things that have influenced my seascapes are summer memories, the study of light on water, and an ecological conscience which leads me to paint at times pristine beaches and clean seas, seeing them as the last bits of paradise on an earth which is becoming all the more anthropocentric.