Golfo Tsakumis is a fiercely proud mother, grandmother, artist, and philanthropist who was born in Greece and immigrated to Vancouver where she has called home for the last five decades. After years of focussing on, and sacrificing for, raising her family, she turned to nurturing the creative side that she embodied as a young child, and began the artistic journey that has taken her from classic to impressionism to contemporary and now abstract. Her love of communicating with people drives her to keep creating her pieces, that are inspired by her life, family and heritage, and each person’s reaction to her art nurtures and helps grow both her mind and soul. She has received international recognition with awards of excellence from various art foundations and in 2021 she fulfilled something that was a lifelong dream: holding her first solo art show in White Rock, BC.
I would tell my old self that she is a resilient woman that is surrounded by love and can handle anything that comes her way and that she will be okay…to be patient and she will be able to focus on herself again one day and will fulfill her dreams…that she is talented and that she needs to believe in herself first before others can believe in her.
I began my art career in my fifties. I focussed on my children and family, and once they started becoming adults and following their paths, that’s when I knew it was time for me to focus on myself and I turned to nurturing my own needs. Since I had not completed my education when I left Greece to immigrate to Canada, I started by getting my diploma, something that was very important to me. And then I turned to working on my creative side, experimenting with different artistic mediums, learning techniques, eventually settling with painting. I knew that expressing myself on canvas was me being true to my most authentic self.
For the last few months I’ve been consumed with creating pieces for a collection reflecting the season of Spring. I love this season; to my core I am a nurturer, and during Spring I reflect on the creation of life, on re-creations in nature and in myself. These pieces are semi realistic/abstract and I’m hoping to sell them soon online through my website, as well as through the Roam E-gallery.
One of my favourite things about my career as an artist is the ability that my art has to connect to another person. I grow as an artist, and as a human being, with each person’s reaction to a piece of work. I value all the conversations and connections that come out of my artwork. When I immigrated to Canada, it took me a while to learn the language and the customs here, and I was incredibly homesick. I was always a very outgoing, highly sociable person and being in a foreign country made me not feel like myself at the beginning, and that was very difficult. Art is its own language that can connect people to one another, and that is definitely one of my very favourite things about this career.
Connect with Golfo:
Facebook: Art by Golfo
Instagram: golfoart
