IN 1971, a young Greek artist left his country, setting out on what would be an eight-year journey during which he would delve into the lure and mystery of the East. 

 

But when Syros island native Michalis Makroulakis left Athens for Persia - he went to Tehran to paint a portrait of Empress Farah, at the invitation of her cousin - his baggage already included the weighty Eastern heritage of Byzantium. That included not only his signature egg-tempera technique of Byzantine iconography, with colours he mixed himself, but also the invaluable lessons of his master teacher Yannis Tsarouchis, who contributed as much as any artist to defining what is Greek in 20th-century painting.

 

By the time Makroulakis returned to Athens eight years later, just before the overthrow of the shah, he had immortalised the mystery of Persian architectural monuments like the 2,000-year-old mud-brick citadel of Bam - a Unesco World Heritage monument destroyed in a 2003 earthquake - and acquired the habit of signing his paintings in Farsi as well as in Greek.

 

Though down-to-earth, he managed to mingle easily with elements of Athenian and international high society and it was not hard to pick up where he left off since his first solo exhibit, with island landscapes, in 1969. 

 

“One of the main reasons I paint is that when you fall in love with a person you want to make them yours in some way. It is the same process with a flower, a mountain or light. I want to conquer it, and that is a kind of erotic act. When I finish a work, it’s over. It has left me,” he explains.

 

His subject-matters range from the natural world to antiquities, the latter of which were exhibited in the Museum of Cycladic art in the 90s, he says. 

 

Makroulakis’ works are imbued with mysticism and combine romantic surrealism with the dazzling realism of a superb technician. The photographic immediacy of his beautiful forms suggest the hovering, timeless aspect of a Platonic idea. The ecstatic depiction of ephemeral beauty is rendered with a Doric simplicity of form, composition and setting, a quintessentially Hellenic aspect of his painting.

 

He stresses that the eight years he spent in Tehran were more decisive in his life than much else.

 

“In Persia, I tried to become Persian, not to cling to my Greekness. From antiquity, Greeks went to Persia, usually when they messed up here. Then, a cultural connection developed from contact with Byzantium, before the advent of Islam. Both Greece and Iran are brotherless nations (in Greek anadelfes, without strong linguistic and cultural ties with other nations). But, of course, I am Greek, so I could not but keep that,” he muses.

 

Aside from the charmed life of being part of Empress Farah’s extended circle, which included a number of Greeks, he held four solo exhibits in Tehran.

 

So then what is Greek about his work?

 

“I imagine everything is Greek about my work. It could not have been done in France or England. They have neither this light, nor this style. I am not trying to imitate something. I paint what I feel and see now.  When I am preparing new works or an exhibit, I do not want to see other artists’ work at all. I want to concentrate on myself and my painting,” he says.

 

Makroulakis tasted his first commercial success before leaving for Iran, selling his first paintings through the Marilena Liakopoulou’s Athens Hilton Art Gallery in 1969.

 

When he brought in two of his works, “they were immediately snapped up,” Liakopoulou told the Athens News. Her father, renowned Greek painter Pericles Vyzantios, was enthusiastic about the young artist’s work and had sent him to her gallery. 

 

Although he has lived comfortably from his art ever since, his beginnings were not so easy. 

 

Liakopoulou remembers that when she saw the response of the public to his work, she offered to pay all his living expenses for a year so that he could devote himself to painting. Fiercely independent, he turned down the offer.

 

“His style is not incorporated in any trend. It is very personal, for very specific reasons. Makroulakis was not influenced by anything around him. He was uninterested in the currents of the period, and he never allowed himself to be influenced by them. That was his power,” she said.

 

“His work is diachronic,” she says. 

 

Makroulakis studied applied arts (decorating, set design and costume) at Konstantinos Doxiadis’ Athenian Technological Institute, where he learned drawing from artists like sculptor Thanasis Apartis. 

 

But it was Tsarouchis who would have the most abiding influence on the painter, not so much in stylistic work (though his male nudes are a direct tribute to his mentor), but on his career and character.

 

As an adolescent, Makroulakis met legendary Tsarouchis through his mother, who was friends with the master’s elder sister. “I was sitting at a cafe with my mother and her old classmate Kiki, who turned to my mother and said, ‘Don’t look that way because Yannis is passing by, and if he sees us he’ll come to talk and embarrass us’,” he recalls.

 

 

The younger painter remembers Tsarouchis wearing a white linen shirt and trousers, along with worn espadrilles without socks. “He walked by briskly, as always. Tsarouchis, as my family warned me, was forbidden territory for me. He represented all things bad: he was poor and gave no money to his family, he was queer and he was a painter. All were equally bad,” Makroulakis recalls with a chuckle.

 

Having lost his father at age 10, Makroulakis saw Tsarouchis as a role model. 

 

“When I was young, I once told him, ‘Kyrie Yanni, you are my spiritual father.’ He immediately screamed, ‘Nooo! I am not your spiritual father!’ I looked at him stunned, wondering what I did to make him angry. ‘I am your spiritual mummy!’ he declared with a laugh.”

 

The two first met in 1959, and eventually Makroulakis became something of an apprentice.

 

“Tsarouchis was a slave driver. When there was a lot of work, he’d lock me up in the house and leave me with a sandwich. On occasion he’d forget, and aunt Koula Pratsika, a pioneer of modern Greek dance and lead dancer in the Delphic Festivals of 1928-29, would drop a sandwich attached to a piece of string,” he says.

 

One morning, Makroulakis’ mother dropped by Tsarouchis’ flat, only to find her son and two young women artists, Elly Komninou and Marina Karella, later wife of Prince Michael, doing the cleaning.

 

“Stunned, my mother asked Tsarouchis how he could make us do this. ‘The first lesson in the Tsarouchis school is housekeeping,’ he replied with his disarming humour,” Makroulakis recalls.

 

Set design was another thing the veteran and budding artists had in common. After 1963, he worked with Tsarouchis’ old friend and Greek groundbreaking director Karolos Kuhn, doing sets for one-act plays by world playwrights.

 

 

Tsarouchis kept his legendary wry humour until the end, when Makroulakis visited him on his hospital deathbed. 

 

“I found him deathly pale, covered with a sheet and with tubes coming out of everywhere. I said ‘Yanni, how are you?’ I loved him very much, like a relative,” Makroulakis recalls. Tsarouchis’ voice was barely audible, but he asked for a handkerchief. “I said I’d get it and asked what he needed it for. ‘I want to play the last act of Traviata for you,’ he whispered. He was dying and he knew it, but he kept his humour.” 

 

“Tsarouchis did not teach me painting as much as ethos, moral standards. He was an exceptionally ethical person. With all his cunning and sauciness, he was a truly ethical person, with a lot of humour,” his protege says.

 

“A year before he died he told me, ‘In the end, what is painting? What is my painting? It’s like a poor copy of a superb painting that never existed.”

 

Makroulakis has exhibited in Greece extensively, and his works were most recently auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2008. His paintings are currently on show at the Theocharakis Institute in Athens, which is commemorating the centennial of Nobel poet Odysseas Elytis’ birth with an art show. He splits his time between Athens and Syros, where he is joint founder of the Kyveli Foundation, dedicated to preserving and researching the history of Greek and European theatre in the 20th century.