Aegean gives painter decades’ worth of inspiration

By Tassoula Eptakili *

May 1972. A young man arrives in Athens for a holiday from his hometown Basel, Switzerland, but does not intend to spend too long in the Greek capital as he is headed for the remote southeastern Aegean island of Symi. He is 22 years old, an artist who has just completed his military service and has been accepted to the Royal College of Art in London for his master’s degree. He has chosen Symi because he wants to spend his holidays working. But, when he inquires about the ferry services there at a travel agent’s in Syntagma Square, the employee at the desk is discouraging to say the least: “Symi? You must be joking! It’s almost impossible to get there. Why don’t you try Sifnos? It has everything you’re looking for.” The next day, the young traveler went to Piraeus and boarded the Kalymnos ferry. Fifteen hours later, the ship docked at Kamares, Sifnos’s port, and a bond that has defined an entire lifetime was forged.

The young man is Christian Brechneff and his recent book, “The Greek House: The Story of a Painter’s Love Affair with the Island of Sifnos,” describes that first summer, which prompted him to keep returning to the island year after year for the next four decades.

Today Brechneff is 64. Since 1977 he has lived in the US, where his book earned an especially warm reception.

“I wanted to drop everything and go to Sifnos, the rocky island in the Aegean Sea lovingly portrayed in his memoir,” wrote Steven Kurutz in his review for the International New York Times. That same emotion is also stirred by Brechneff’s paintings, canvases illuminated by the Greek light, where landscapes are depicted with astonishing tenderness.

I met Brechneff in Athens recently, just before he set off for Piraeus to...