About — Costas_Constantinides

COSTAS CONSTANTINIDES
Traditional illustration — folklore & fantasy

About/Contact

ABOUT:

EMAIL
costasconsc@gmail.com

Having grown up in Cyprus, I have been influenced by religion, nature, and sociocultural schisms. The island has a long history of traumas, plagued by multiple conquerors, religious strife, and finally an invasion that left it as the only country in the world with a divided capital. Like the split island itself, this has left its people divided over the island’s true identity and who they are as Cypriots. Some stand strong with religious fervor and nationalism, while others long for a more peaceful, loving unity, looking to the island’s natural beauty for purpose and comfort. As I grew, I was affected by these factors and I began to have my own questions about who we are as a people and what the island needs.

My work explores this duality, where love and beauty clash with intolerance and strife. Within this duality exists a horrible and brutal world which is at the same time loving and beautiful. This informs my work, alongside the normalization of grotesquery and its existence alongside beauty. Figures are depicted as divine and beautiful, yet wretched and grotesque; landscapes are vibrant and blooming with color, yet filled with suffering and horror.

With the island being a strong bastion of the Greek Orthodox Church, I attended many Orthodox Church ceremonies and sacraments as a child, not knowing fully at the time what they meant but still in awe of the spiritual energy that resided in these spaces and the liturgies within them. Today, I am still affected by the power of these churches, not so much by the faith itself, but by how ancient they are (some date back to the Crusades), and how alive they still feel, with their gazing saints within; still suffering, still loving. Some nestled in forests, others atop hills and mountains, they breathe with the land itself.

This spiritual power inspires my work greatly, with the imagery I portray often being tied to religious iconography and folklore, but inverting the divine beings that bring salvation to ones bringing conflict and hardship in exchange for the very salvation they are meant to offer. Cruelty merges with beauty and grace. In this, I create worlds outside our own, but parallel to it; surreal and mythological, these worlds are informed by the human experience and consciousness, chasing themes we obsess over, such as death, love, and survival.