Spring Break
Balasis: LUC art professor goes pop
Andrew Ptaschinski
Issue date: 4/18/07 Section: Diversions
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Balasis showed an interest in art early in life and explains that his drawings "seemed to have this graphic feel" even in elementary school. Reflecting on his doodles when he was young, Balasis says, "It's interesting because my paintings now really just look like large graphics." From an early age and still today, the interest in graphic design dominates Balasis' work.
Although he had an early interest in art, Balasis did not consider a career in art until a high school teacher suggested studying graphic design in college. Balasis took this advice and graduated from Michigan State with a degree in fine arts. Shortly after graduating, Balasis started his own graphic design company called B Creative. To gain clients, Balasis went around to restaurants and asked if they wanted a menu redesigned. In this way, Balasis started to establish a name for his company, which would go on to do design work for companies as large as General Motors.
At the age of 23, Balasis decided he wanted to become more serious about his paintings and began to show at a gallery. Balasis describes his earlier work as "much more abstract" and "stylistically completely different." Although bright colors and bold outlines continue to define his work, Balasis' recent art features a distinctly comic book style.
The aesthetics of Balasis' paintings derive primarily from two major sources: the comic books and cartoons Balasis read as a child and the work of Roy Lichtenstein, a highly influential pop art painter of the 1960s. Lichtenstein was the first artist to utilize the comic book imagery to push the boundary of what can be considered fine art. Although Balasis uses a highly similar styling, he explains that Lichtenstein's work was more about the "relationship to mass printed cartoon and comic book imagery as fine art," whereas his work takes these forms and applies them to a "a pop culture of 2007" to offer societal critiques.
Although Balasis relies heavily of the styling of '60s and '70s comic books, he explains that he is "usually pretty up to the minute on trends" to keep his paintings current.
Balasis describes the creation of his paintings as "quite a lengthy process." He starts by deciding on the theme he wants his next painting to convey and then flips through "hundreds of comic books" he has in his studio to find a form that would reflect his desired content. Next he makes a sketch off that image, scans it into the computer and cleans up the lines to make a bold and high contrast image. This image is then printed and projected onto a canvas where he traces it and paints the lines in black. Due to the graphic nature of Balasis' work, lines play an especially important role, and he explains that he "adds a dynamic to those black lines" by varying "where they will be thick and thin."