When you walk down the street how much of the whole vista does one really see?

Usually just a few snippets as you pass the rest by. We tend to focus our view— what’s down the side street to the left, what’s up top at the building to the right, what is coming up straight ahead. Each time you focus within the environment you don’t actually see—with your eyes—a majority of what exists. You sense it. Just that snippet your eye catches is enough to bring the whole environment mentally into view.

A native New Yorker, I have forever been inundated with the overwrought vistas of the urban landscape. My work’s ultimate goal is to create serene works from this source. 

My art attempts to focus on incomplete portions of the larger vista, inviting the viewer’s mind to fill in the blanks and extend the image beyond the borders of the canvas., in hopes that they gain a sense of the visual surroundings from where it came.

Attempting to bring a more tangible experience to the physical surroundings—that birthed the idea to begin with—I build up the canvas to mimic the textures of the materials that make the city.

I state I am an artist

Q: What drives you to paint?
A: What drives you to ask? It’s some weird, angsty joy that I get when I attempt to bring into existence something that my mind said “You should make that”. Then, I think of the ways I want to do it. From there, I try to figure out “how exactly the hell do I do that?”—I think they call that ‘process’. 

Frankly, I don’t know what I am doing most of the time.

Q: Why do you paint what you paint?
A: Depends on the painting I suppose. Please feel free to reach out. I’m always game to explain. Reach me on Instagram @see_tsanos. or use this email thingy. I am happy to respond.

[FAIR WARNING: If you do reach out with a question, I can be pretty verbose in my response—my friends can attest]

Drawing since childhood, after school I eschewed any time for my art for reasons of “practicality” and “responsibility”; when life took over and went where I did not expect (as life does).

While I still dabbled over the years, there was never any sustained effort to my work. I now find myself in a place where I am done concerning myself with practicality and my responsibilities are not as acute as they had been. I am finally exploring a part of myself that I annoyingly left dormant for way too long.