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| Reflections on Hopi $975 |
Santa Fe Charmer #145 $875 |
Santa Fe Charmer #140 $875 |
Most afternoons in a studio overlooking the Tesuque Valley, Tavlos can be found painting designs on coyotes howling at the moon. Here in the Tesuque Valley, he can hear coyotes doing just that at night.
His real career started when he moved to the Southwest in his late twenties and started looking at Native Americans - their designs and their culture. He looked at them the way you listen to coyotes howling at night, that is to say with some care, and some imagination. But why he started doing that goes back a long way to a very different kind of town and place, the midwest, 1940's small, American, complicated by Greek parents, and the early death of his father when Tavlos was nine. Here you already have the seeds of ambivalence that probably had as much to do with Tavlos becoming an artist as his inheriting his mother's talent for drawing. That got him as far as the University of Illinois where one of his professors encouraged him and so he did a lot of work in the style he works in, but without the subject.
When he got to Santa Fe he found a house on Tano Road, the old Sam Marsh place, with a great view of the Sangre de Christo and Jemez mountains. He moved in and started painting the landscape and reading about Native Americans and you didn't see him for weeks. Then he got really interested in Indigenous culture - even now he still travels to their homes and dances. Throughout the years, Tavlos has traveled extensively. The whimsy and magic of his work reflect the cultures and landscapes he loves most - Hopi, Greece, and Egypt.
Eventually he built his own house not far from the Sam Marsh place and married a young wife, who got an illness the way people unaccountably do and died. For a long time after that he did absolutely nothing. 'Make some paintings,' people would say, 'just do some drawings.' 'I can't, there's nothing down there,' he would reply, making it sound so simple: that connection between feelings and art.
That was in 1984. Now the studio overlooking the Tesuque Valley is littered with coyotes from the past, as if he had struck the true gold of loneliness and had brought it up from some mine.
The murals are something he loves to do in people's houses, churches and flowers, hollyhocks all over a wall, each one designed specifically for that particular house, and that particular wall, according to the interests of its owner.
