Bill Papas’s artistic reputation was established in the 1960s and 70s as England’s premier cartoonist and book illustrator. Upon retirement, Bill and his wife Tessa moved to Ermioni, the village in the Peloponnesus that his father had left in 1900.
This exhibition includes pen and ink drawings as well as watercolors and acrylics that were inspired by a visit Bill made to Greece in 1998. He felt the series should have been titled “The Vanishing Greeks” as Greece was modernizing rapidly. The cities were growing and the villages were emptying, but Bill still found places where village life continued as it always had … donkey transport, ouzos, retsina and backgammon in the tavernas, and everywhere the wonderful welcome–the filoxenia–that Greeks give to strangers.
He, Papas, is a highly distinguished and original artist, whose work, I firmly believe, is not only of significance of its time, but will make an important contribution to the journalistic history of that time.
Alan Coren, editor Punch Magazine, London
Bill Papas is a man of many talents, a superb draftsman and one of the world’s most distinguished editorial cartoonists.
Harold Haydon, art critic Chicago Sun-Times
Visit the Hellenic-American Cultural Center & Museum to view a complete slide show of this as well as any of the past exhibits.
