Biography

Born in the Netherlands. Art, history and travelling have been my lifelong passions.

I have a B.A. in Egyptology from State University of Groningen. During my studies in Cairo with a scholarship from the Arab Republic of Egypt I took the opportunity to travel extensively in Egypt. I have been a member of the excavation teams of the Brooklyn Museum  in Luxor and I acted as tour guide with groups of Dutch tourists.

After I met Lord William Taylour, a British archeologist well known for his work on Mycenae, the focus of my interest shifted to Greece. Until his death in 1989, I travelled every summer in the company of Lord William through Europe, the Balkans and Greece.  As a member of Lord William’s expedition team in the Archeological Museum of Nauplia I learned to draw archeological objects.

Since 1985 I live in Greece, where I got married to my Greek husband Panagiotis, with whom I have  a son Spyros Tragas, who now studies in Groningen, the Netherlands. For more than twenty years I lived in the  closed community of the little village of Afissou, Laconia, working in the coffee-house of my husband and in the orange- and olive groves of the  family. A few years ago I moved to Sparta.

In 1996 I remembered my love and talent for painting and since then I’ve spent all my time painting. I’ve devoted myself to painting the many different aspects of rural life and landscape in Laconia.  I find my  inspiration in what I’ve grown  accustomed to call   “ the garden of Menelaos ”:  the by Mount Taygetos dominated Laconian  landscape  around Sparta in  rural Peloponnese, with  donkeys and sheep, olive groves and olive-picking  farmers, the Menelaion,  temple to  Helen and her husband Menelaos,  Mystras, with a fortress and castle built by Frankish crusader knights  and with  many Byzantine churches with well-preserved wall paintings  and last, but not least the ruins of once mighty Sparta.   

I painted my first oil portrait  of my namesake grandmother when I was seventeen; it still adorns one of the walls in the house of my mother. I prefer to use oil paints when I paint a portrait because I find that it provides me with the means to achieve a near lifelike result.

I work from photos which gives me the opportunity to work on the portrait as often and as long as I feel necessary.  I am happy to take commissions.

When I visit my homeland Groningen in the Netherlands I always feel the need  to paint  the beautiful  landscape, but for lack of time I usually have to be contented with taking photographs which I work from later on in my studio. I feel that watercolor is the ideal medium for painting the water-dominated landscape.

Apart from being a “writer of life” or zographos, which is the Greek word for painter, I am also a “writer of images” or eikonographos, in its Anglicized form iconographer. I paint Byzantine icons. The orthodox believe that the icon plays a role in the salvation of man. They believe that man was created in the image of God but that man allowed that image, and with it the world, to be corrupted. When God assumed a fully human nature without ceasing to be fully God He thereby restored the image. Venerating an icon or image of Christ, which is the affirmation of the reconciliation of the human and the divine, the orthodox believe  that they are  enabled to contemplate the person who is the model for their  theosis or union with God.   Realism in byzantine iconography is absent, because it would merely reproduce the likeness of the world in a state of corruption.  The way in which the themes are depicted is standardized, since the purpose of an image is not to display artistic originality but to reveal the subject's deeper, immutable meaning.

For a great number of years I have been working on a freelance basis for the Ministry of Culture of Greece drawing pottery excavated in Laconia at different sites and from different periods.

Since 2006 I have been conducting courses in oil painting.

I have taken part in several group exhibitions in the Netherlands as well as in Greece. In December 2011 I had my first solo exhibition in the Cultural Center of Sparta which was a great success.

Currently I am working on a new series of paintings in which water plays the leading role.