Pictured is a collaborative work by Peter Hoffer and Georgios C. Kyriakos to be featured in a Gathering Place exhibit called “Tradeoffs.”
Submitted photo
Pictured is a collaborative work by Peter Hoffer and Georgios C. Kyriakos to be featured in a Gathering Place exhibit called “Tradeoffs.”
Submitted photo
CLARKS SUMMIT — A somewhat unique exhibit entitled “Tradeoffs” will be coming to the Gathering Place this month, providing a chance for locals to enjoy quality artwork with a backdrop of cooperation and shared respect.
Peter Hoffer and Georgios C. Kyriakos got the idea to work on shared pieces of artwork while at a dinner party before the pandemic. Their idea was that one artist would begin a work in any style and then trade it off to the other to be continued and reimagined in any way he felt best with no direction and discussion. The originating artist would then get the work back to either finish or decide that the work was complete.
Hoffer, from the Clarks Summit area, describes the artwork as “very colorful, energetic, spontaneous.”
“I don’t think that we ever established a style or a particular look, because we weren’t going for that,” Hoffer said. “It was about letting it unfold in a spontaneous, natural way.”
Hoffer pointed out that he and Kyriakos were just getting to know each other when they started the project.
“This was really over the period of a year,” he said. “We’d do a few pieces and then not do anything and then come back to it. I think altogether we did about 40 works.”
Hoffer said neither of the artists kept track of what the other was doing and there was limited discussion of what the artists would do.
“The initial artist developed the piece in a way that the second artist could creatively respond,” he said. “Instead the initial artist established some forms and colors and the other person had free range to change what was initially done.”
“We had an agreement from the beginning that we can put in or take out of the painting — whatever each one feels like,” Kyriakos said. “And that’s what happened and it worked very good.”
Kyriakos, who lived in Waverly for many years and recently moved to Bethlehem, said he’s happy that the artwork will be on display at The Gathering Place.
“I was a volunteer there from day one when I moved there,” he said. “I volunteered every Thursday. I tried to help them and they helped me too.” Kyriakos said The Gathering place was a great opportunity to bring a variety of cultural programming to a variety of people. “It was necessary for such a place to be in Clarks Summit,” he said.
Hoffe received a BA in Art from George Washington University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He also did post graduate sabbatical study at Rochester Institute of Technology. After more than four decades as a full-time member of the art faculty at Marywood University, he continues his art in his home studio that includes his recent collaboration with Georgios. His work ranges in style from his earlier representational to his current abstractions and non-objective forms.
Georgios C. Kyriakos, who recently moved to Bethlehem from Waverly, studied art at the Royale Academie de Beaux Arts in Liege, Belgium. He was the art director for a collective of night clubs and coffee shops in Belgium, promoting live music, design, painting, photography and collaborative creative expression. He has exhibited paintings in Belgium, Holland and Spain. As his paintings can range from abstract to surrealism to geometric, he refers to his painting style as oneiric — reference to his native Greek language, oneiros — meaning “dream.”
