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Editor's Notes

• #3: Born in the village of Anaphotia near the town of Larnaca in Cyprus in 1933, His family were very poor peasant farmers.
• #4: Scenes of his life as a child looking after his family’s flock of sheep and goats in Cyprus often appeared in his paintings.
• #5: Between 1878 and 1960 Cyprus was a British colony and so in 1953 Stass travelled to Britain in search of a better life. He had no thoughts of being an artist at this time.
• #6: Arriving in London with no money he quickly got a job washing dishes at the ABC Tearoom in Tottenham Court Road. Soon after that he moved to Leeds in northern England, where he and his brothers opened the first Greek restaurant in the city, the oddly named Montevideo.
• #7: The Montevideo was popular with students and tutors from the nearby Leeds College of Art, one of the most progressive and radical art schools in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. One of these regular visitors was the Head of Fine Art at the art school, Harry Thubron. Thubron decided it would be a good idea for Stass to join the art school as a student, even though Stass had no entrance qualifications and did not even complete school in Cyprus due to his family’s poverty. Why Thubron decided Stass should become an artist is a mystery. It was just a radical thing to do in the 1960s - invite someone with no background or qualifications in art to study art. Stass said, ‘It was like entering paradise for me studying at Leeds.’
• #9: It was at Leeds College of Art that Stass found his distinctive style of painting and made friends with some of the most significant international artists of the post-war period.
• #10: One of those artists was the abstract painter Terry Frost, who persuaded Stass to join him in St Ives in Cornwall in the south West of England.
• #11: St Ives was a well known artists’ colony, with artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson working there. Stass shared a studio with the abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
• #13: Now his friendships in Leeds became more radical as Stass became close to avant-garde performance artists such as Robin Page.
• #14: Page was a key figure in the development of art happenings, street art and performance as art. He began as a painter but moved into performance and street art in the revolutionary artistic atmosphere in British art schools in the 1960s. For Page it was the freedom to experiment he found at Leeds College of Art in the 1960s that was important.
• #15: In 1966 he staged the street art happening Merry Christmas ’66. Intended to he staged on the steps of Leeds Town Hall on Christmas Day 1966, the performance had to be moved inside Leeds College of Art after the police objected to Page lying naked in a public space. Leeds Town Hall at that time was also the local police headquarters.
• #17: Earlier in 1966 Page orchestrated a police raid on Stass’s first solo exhibition also held at Leeds College of Art. It was a show called Lovers and Romances.
• #19: A notorious court case followed with the police were goaded into prosecuting Paraskos for exhibiting this painting on the grounds that it shows male nudity.
• #20: Leading figures in the art world, including Herbert Read and Norbert Lynton gave evidence in favour of Stass. The court case led to global publicity and led to a change in the law in Britain governing public exhibitions of art.
• #21: And there is an irony that some of the paintings that led to Stass being prosecuted by the British police are now owned by the main state art gallery in Britain, the Tate, including these two paintings from the 1966 exhibition.
• #22: A year after he was prosecuted in Leeds Stass was invited to show his work alongside Patricia Douthwaite, Ian Dury and Herbert Kitchen at London’s prestigious ICA gallery.
• #23: Notably, in the exhibition catalogue he emphasised his unusual origins as an artist. He described himself as ‘Born 1933 in Cyprus of peasant stock’. The idea of being an outsider to the polite bourgeois world of mainstream art was to become a recurring theme in the way Stass presented himself as an artist.
• #24: Increasingly Stass’s paintings were becoming more political too. Often the themes related to events in Cyprus. In the 1960s Cyprus suffered an ongoing low level civil war between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities on the island with irregulars on the island attacking the other side. Much of this was violence stoked by right-wing politicians and military leaders in mainland Greece and Turkey. In 1967 one of the atrocities alleged to have taken place was the rape of Greek Cypriot women on the island by members of the Turkish military based in Cyprus. It prompted Stass to paint this painting, now in the City of Leeds Art Gallery.
• #25: As the political situation in Cyprus deteriorated in the early 1970s Stass painted Liberty Abandons Cyprus.
• #26: During this period Stass was becoming one of the most highly respected art tutors in Britain. He became Head of Painting at Canterbury College of Art (now called the University for Creatives Arts)
• #27: During this period Stass was becoming one of the most highly respected art tutors in Britain. He became Head of Painting at Canterbury College of Art (now called the University for Creatives Arts)
• #28: His art also continued to develop.
• #29: Sometimes revisiting the religious themes he saw in the Orthodox church art he knew as a young boy.
• #30: But also addressing directly the social and political themes that were affecting Cyprus. He returned to live in Cyprus in 1989 and in paintings like The Missing he depicted the relatives of those who had disappeared without a trace during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
• #31: But also addressing directly the social and political themes that were affecting Cyprus. He returned to live in Cyprus in 1989 and in paintings like The Missing he depicted the relatives of those who had disappeared without a trace during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
• #32: Although the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey separated the two ethnic groups on the island, political violence still happened as in the murder of the Cypriot journalist Kutlu Adalı. This event, in 1996 led Stass to make this painting.
• #33: Although the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey separated the two ethnic groups on the island, political violence still happened as in the murder of the Cypriot journalist Kutlu Adalı. This event, in 1996 led Stass to make this painting.
• #34: And in 1994 he began a series of paintings looking at the sometimes inhuman treatment of women in Cyprus. In particular he wanted to challenge what he saw as the hypocrisy in the way people judged the behaviour of men and the behaviour of women. He exhibited these in a show entitled Human rights – man’s inhumanity to woman.
• #35: Stass died in 2014 His son, Michael Paraskos, has written that Stass died a disappointed man. He never received the credit he deserved for bringing a specifically Cypriot form of modern art to Cyprus in the 1960s. He was deliberately shunned by the University of Cyprus when it was set up in 1989, despite Archbishop Makarios and later presidents promising Stass that his Cyprus art school would one day form the university’s fine art faculty.
• #36: His work is still shunned by the two major museums of modern art in Cyprus, the Leventis Art Gallery and the Nicosia Municipal Art Gallery. He declared in the catalogue of the 1967 exhibition at the ICA in London that he was ‘of peasant stock’ he demonstrated he knew he would never be accepted by the bourgeois worlds of art and education in Cyprus who want artists to toe the line. His art was always too radical and in life and in death he is always the outsider.
• #37: “I was always a bit of an anarchist. Not the kind of anarchist who wants to blow everything up. The kind of anarchist who is intellectual. Who wants the world to make its own decisions and take responsibility for those decisions. Do not listen to the regulations and laws of others.” Stass Paraskos Inteviewed in Politis (Cyprus newspaper) 28 October 2013