The trees of Fougaro, the trees of life
On Saturday 17 May 2025, FOUGARO ARTCENTER celebrates Museum Night with an open workshop for teenagers and adults by visual artist Emilia Tsekoura, as a tribute to the environment!
Inspiration for this workshop comes from the trees of Fougaro, and we shall gather to paint them. We look forward to welcoming you to experience the scents of Spring, and set up our easel for some al fresco painting in the open-air areas of Fougaro.
Associated with life, oxygen and bird nests, trees may not move around like their inhabitants but have been loved and revered like deities. They are man's companions, an endangered part of nature, and a source of hope against the gloom of climate change.
The tree symbolises resurrection, reproduction; its trunk is the axis of the world (axis mundi). We shall remember the words of Paul Klee about life and the artist himself being like the trunk of a tree: "From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work. Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root..... He [the artist] is merely a channel."
Emilia Tsekoura
Born in Athens, Emilia Tsekoura studied at the Art Communication & Learning team in Athens (1978-80), at the Boston Museum’s School of Fine Arts (1980-84) and at the same time at Tufts University, graduating with a Bachelor in Arts & Sciences.
Between 1988 and 2013, Emilia taught at the Athens College using differentiation teaching, art therapy and the method of Harvard University’s Project Zero (TFU, Visual Thinking). To this day she has had several solo shows in Greece and the US and has participated in numerous group exhibitions.
She is motivated by concepts originating from her own nature and expressed in autobiographical and expressionist ways: woman, Goddess/Idol, birth, genesis, the ovoid, rebirth. The philosophy of constant change in life, nature and art is always the key principle behind her every work.
One element in her art is symbolism and the translation of icons into archetypes. The egg, the sphere, the round, the zero or “nothing” and their reflections, the heart, the spiral, the geometries of nature and many other familiar symbols and concepts appear in various guises, media and materials throughout her artistic course.
She works in Athens and teaches at the art workshops of Fougaro in Nafplio since 2013.
