Theodore Polos (Greece/USA 1902-1976)

 Born in Greece in 1902, Polos left home when he was fourteen years old in 1916.   At the ripe old age of 14 he arrived in Boston, where he went to high school for about a year.  In 1922 he went to California to visit his brother who was at the University of California.  He lived primarily in the Bay Area for the remainder of his life.  He had limited art training, but he did attend the Oakland College of Arts and Crafts for a semester and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  It could be said that it was providence that elevated Polos to the heights he achieved during his lifetime, but that would be inaccrurate.  During his life he won numerous prizes for his paintings and during a time of great economic hardship, he managed to succeed when many failed.  His paintings are outstanding but his lithographic work is also stunning.

Polos was first and foremost a painter, and in his printworks there is a painter's love of the bitten line. His control of his artistic equipment enabled him to create works that stopped before reaching the brink of excess, and his fine compositions, even today are technically stunning and still modern.  Polos shows the characteristics of someone who had already lived quite a life by the time he began making art and the original force of his viewpoint and passion is always apparent.  The interpretation of landscapes, scenes and characters always seem to be his goal.  His extraordinary printwork show in every detail in the total effect of both a profound youth and a life lived in action,  The great bulk of his works on paper are technically superb and his power to render an idea with unmistakable clarity and force is always apparent.  Perhaps when Polos is weakest is when is printworks are too closely related to the pen-and-ink manner.  At his best, his works make it clear he himself is acquainted with his subject from every angle.

I think sometimes that the influence of an Aegean birth in Polos's work appears in his passionate interest in rendering effects of light and dark, and this makes his landscapes come out of the background almost in a relief style.  There is not much that is said about the tactile aspect of printmaking but there is a kind of dimensionality to it in the hands of the talented.  The art of simplifying our thought or view is also something that has a kind of magic also, in the right hands.  Polos experimented with many mediums and it shows.  His printworks have a kind of fidelity to objective fact combined with a modernist's eye.  The characteristics of his work are clarity and a total lack of over-emphasis, and of course even in a new century...a modernity that still exists even today.