Gelos Michailidis The Netherlands, b. 1968

Gelos Michailidis was born in 1968 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
He started as a graffitti artist in 1986, which he did for several years.
He is self taught and started painting in 2009. When he visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, he got inspired by the old Dutch masters (Andreas Schelfhout, Jacob van Ruisdael & Barend Cornelis Koekkoek).
At first he painted the Dutch sea and dunes, and also typical Dutch skies, in their myriad combinations of clouds and light. He was fascinated by the light and space and the shadows on the landscape.
In the last few years, he has mainly been painting the sea and waves. The structure of the turning waves always give a different composition, such as the foam flakes and the splashes. And also the transparency of the water. When the light falls on the waves, he want to capture this. This is a challenge to paint. he paints the waves with oil paint layer by layer on a panel, like the old Dutch masters did. That way, he gets depth and transparency.
He doesn’t paint on the beach. He takes pictures of waves on different days at different times. On his computer, he zooms in to see every detail of the wave. Then he starts painting, and turn all those photographed waves into his own, ideal wave. Hyperrealistic and personal. The sparkles in the sea, the dunes and the skies are an unrelenting stream of inspiration and ideas that he processes on panels in oils.