Between her multicolored hair and spunky personality, Eftihia Peroulas is hard to miss. In her third year at North Central as a French major, she’s balancing life between heading to France to study abroad in the spring and quietly creating her art in her free time. From digital art to painted canvas, she has the dynamic to make her stand out in the new age of art on the internet.
Emily Arias: How did you first get interested in art?
Eftihia Peroulas: “Basically, I was a little kid and my sister was drawing a lot and I just kinda copied everything she did because I loved her so much. I will show you how I used to draw. It was a circle with little hands coming out of the ears. It was terrible, I used to legitimately draw like this. I have pictures that are like this. After a while, I learned ‘oh, if I do a U it looks like a face’ and now I could do stuff like that. I don’t really remember. I mean I never really had anyone say like ‘be an artist.’ I don’t know. It was just kind of something that I did.”
EA: I know you use a lot of different mediums, but which one would you claim as your favorite?
EP: “I don’t know if I really have a favorite. I think it depends on my mood, so if I’m feeling very perfectionisty it’s digital because it’s very clean. If i’m in a smaller space like my apartment then I can’t really bust out all of my paints and doing something big and crazy, so what I usually do is digital. But, when I’m feeling very emotional I do a lot of abstract stuff. I save old water bottles and fill them up with water and a little bit of paint and I just swirl it around. I use old gesso, old stuff and baking powder … and you know, you kinda just put that on a canvas and it looks really cool and I feel better at the end of it.”
EA: How do you choose your subjects for what you’re creating?
EP: “For my digital stuff, it’s usually portaiture or figurative work. I like drawing women. I don’t know why. I’ve just always been obsessed with that, probably because I’ve been obsessed with Gustav Klimt’s style and I really like his linear kind of way of depicting females. Usually, if I’m drawing a woman she has to have a certain look, like I can’t just go on Pinterest and look for reference photos of models because I’m like ‘I don’t want to draw your face, like FU, you’re prettier than I am’ so what I usually do is look for a face with a certain type of symmetry, but also something kind of weird or different about it. I think that’s why I like to draw my own face a lot because it is symmetrical but it’s kind of sharp and different.”
EA: I know its hard to pick favorites, but if you could only save one of your pieces from a fire … which would it be?
EP: “My favorite piece is called ‘Bipolar in a Nutshell’ and basically I was making abstract paintings and it started off as a seascape painting with palette knives, and I was making one for Dr. (Sara) Eaton who passed away because I was really close to her and I love her and miss her. Shout out to Dr. E! So, I was making one for her and then I found out she had cancer and then I was like ‘,OK I have to make her something amazing before I give it to her because I don’t know, she might pass away and I want to make her something awesome’ so I was trying to make all these oceanscapes and it was not working. So, I said you know what, I’m just going to do something really random, lots of colors and stuff like that, and this really angsty, sad, depressing THING came out. Then I was like ‘wow, this is not something I should give to someone who has cancer, like this is terrible’ but at the same time I was happy it came out because then I was able to make more of a clean piece, something that you can give to someone who is battling cancer. Unfortunately, this guy told me that he was gonna like put it up in his office because I like gave it to him and he said ‘oh yeah, I’ll put it on consignment and if anybody asks for the pricing or your information I’ll give you advertisment’ but he ended up never paying me, so he took my favorite painting. So I told him ‘Hey, here’s my Paypal, you should do the right thing and pay me.”
EA: Who have been your greatest artistic inspirations?
EP: “Obviously my artistic inspirations have been Gustav Klimt, Georgia O’Keeffe, but more contemporary artists would be @Marine_edith, she does cool stuff, it’s like seascape stuff, @Daliahammar, she went to the Art Institute, she’s from Chicago and she’s my age, and @damianchavezart.”
EA: Do you have any artistic goals for yourself over the next year?
EP: “I actually have a lot. I had the worst artist block for like a couple of years cause I just was in a weird place, and yeah, I know that art’s like … oh, you know, you practice and you get better and all this stuff, but sometimes when your mind is f***ed up, your art is f***ed up and you just can’t make it work, at least for me, it’s a very emotional thing for me. My goal was to get into creating something every day. So, my ‘new year new me’ was not getting a new diet, it was creating something at least once a day. So my goal this year is just create stuff. I’m trying to see if there’s an open spot to present my work at North Central by the end of the month, because next term i’m gonna be in France and I wouldn’t really have any time to present my work on campus in the spring. Then, pretty much just like trying to get my work out there, get people to know that I actually exist instead of just hiding in my room painting and keeping all this stuff to myself.”
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Three facts about Peroulas:
- She is currently creating an Islamic wood carving that was inspired by her recent trip to Morocco
- Her eyebrows shed when she’s stressed out
- All profits from purchases made on her society6 site go to the Karam Foundation.
To see more of her work, check out her Instagram page at @eutuxia_art
