Sculpting, engraving and painting are the first three easily recognizable arts that so skillfully combine and have a common material that holds them together, polymer clay. When Arieta Stavridou creates, the chunks of clay she shapes become works of art of unparalleled aesthetics, as if those artworks do not aim to impress your eyes, but your very soul!
Arieta lives in Cyprus and has studied art in Greece. Her first interaction with polymer clay was about 15 years ago. She attended two classes with the polymer clay guild of Cyprus and this was a thunderous love at first sight! Arieta’s journey involving polymer clay started with small objects and jewelry.
Every time she made something, she wanted to go a little further and that’s how the long journey began. For a long time the artist was involved in creating millefiori canes. Using them on small surfaces was not enough for Arieta and that’s when she started working on larger objects. As a tea lover she started to adorn her teapots.
The way Arieta turns a simple utility object into a piece of art is disarming. In her portofolio we can find a collection of teapots with various and special shapes, dressed with lots of different and colorful canes.
Arrieta’s teapots covered in multicolored polymer chunks are definitely eye catchers.
It was about the same time that she considered working on bigger surfaces so she moved on to plates. Also, large surfaces provided her more balance in terms of composition and color!
After the teapots and the decorative dishes, Arieta started giving weight to portraits.
When the pandemic started it was a difficult period, for some less for others more. It was a period that tested our endurance, played with our emotions and made us re-evaluate many things. The beginning of this different era found Arieta in her workshop, yearning to express herself as a woman, as an artist, as a person. She combined polymer clay with painting, engraving and sculpture. The result is outstanding pieces of art with character and structure in which we have noticed a special feature: everything has a very strong expressiveness and a power in the eyes. The look and expression of Arieta’s polymer clay portraits is so intense that they really capture you.
This is how she started her female portraits: women of any color, with a different look and eyes that try to convey to us what each one of them carries in their souls. “As a woman I had to express many feelings,” Arieta says about her polymer clay paintings. “Many of my portraits are of women. Famous, unknown, from different nationalities, with different looks, showing different emotions - emotions that can touch the soul in so many ways.”
The teaching part is another key chapter for Arieta. Her main occupation in Cyprus is as an art teacher in a High School. She aims to introduce various materials and mediums to children, one of them being polymer clay. This material is unknown to many children, so she tries to show them how many beautiful and unlimited possibilities it offers. What she always tells to her students and to anyone who wants to get to know this material better is to do it with all their soul. She believes that anything less does not fit polymer clay.
Her students are told that they will have to devote many hours of work, experimentation and research, thus slowly discovering their own identity!
Arieta is definitely a visual artist. Her latest creations - called “EYE CONTACT” - is composed of eye paintings, made with polymer clay. “I believe that the most important features of a face are the eyes so my last creations are all about eyes. Eyes that can speak to the soul.”
“When the soul is filled with big and true smiles, with many and beautiful words, it gives
you the strength to move on and develop what you do and what you love so much!”
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