Penelope Fiona Efstathiou
My art practice is an exploration of painting and drawing whilst portraying my feelings towards current affairs and how I react to them. I use my painting as a way to express myself.
Penny's genuine interest, passion, and motivation was to explore her creative strengths in painting and mark making, which was often instinctive. She was a self taught painter and graduated with a BA Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University.
She spent most of her working life in the hospitality industry, as a head chef, setting up new restaurants and kitchens. As a chef, she was still a creative practitioner, as plating food is an artform in itself. She always presented food considering the aesthetic look of the plate and not just the taste. In the early years of being a mother, she took painting classes and walled her own home in her own artwork, often inspired by the impressionist painters.
I feel my painting is in the early experimental stages and I enjoy exploring with a broad range of materials and colours. I want to understand more about the language of painting, mark making and abstraction.
She liked to locate herself as an abstract painter as it is where she felt that she connected with other artists. She was interested in a broad range of painters from Goya and Henri Matisse to the early abstract expressionist painters such as Hans Hoffman, Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock. She admired the freedom of their work and the diversity of their techniques.
Colour was an important element in her work, it seemed to be an inbuilt automatic reaction to her way of seeing the world around her. She used colour as a dominant element to express emotion and mood, to bring or recall a feeling or a memory to the conscious mind. It allowed her the freedom of expression in the process of application, as well as the physicality of applying the paint to a canvas.
I would like my work to have intention and to represent, taking off the mask, scratching the surface showing sincerity, vulnerability creating an image that stands for something else, made by one mind, that can be shared with others.
Exploring the Scottish Highlands with my two girls, enjoying nature and the countryside (1994).
At my first exhibition launch.
At Bentinck Art Studio
Penelope (Penny) Rissik-Efstathiou was born on March 3, 1963, in Woking Surrey, and was brought up by her proud adoptive parents Henry William (Bill) and Clare Margaret Rissik.
As Bill was in the army Penny grew up in various UK and Canadian bases. By all accounts she was a true rebel child, quietly confident, never wanted to be told what to do as she made her own rules – proving she was determined and head strong from a young age. She was also intelligent, smart and savvy despite bunking off a few lessons at school! Penny was schooled both in Canada and the UK, as when her father came out of the army the family settled in Malvern, Worcestershire.
Whilst living in Canada she had learned to ski which she loved, played Ice Hockey and ice skated which she carried on when she came back to UK and learnt how to do figure skating; a very different more poised and elegant technique to skating around the ice hockey pitch.
Penny had passionately wanted to go Art School however whilst her art work was of a superb standard – because she had not gained the necessary A levels, she was unable to gain entry. Instead, she followed her second passion and that was cookery and enrolled at a culinary school in London. Once qualified she worked in many different fancy London restaurants including the Café de Lance rising to the position of head chef, which for a woman to achieve back in the 80's was quite an accolade.
The passion for art had never gone away and she carried on painting through most of her 'hospitality' years; she finally embarked on her BA Fine Art degree course in 2017.
During her studies she made many friends with other fellow artists, and she also became part of the Bentinck Art Studio. It was a tough time to study for a degree as the pandemic struck in the middle of it. During Covid, and as hospitality was so badly hit – Penny had worked at a Covid testing site and she carried on working hard to complete her degree – which she did and proudly graduated in 2021.
What happened next was not part of the plan – as devastatingly, in the same year as graduating, she was diagnosed with cancer. Penny's sunset came on Thursday 7th November when after courageously trying to beat cancer she passed peacefully at the Hayward House hospice with Angelena and Isabella by her side.
This website is maintained by her daughters, sharing their mother's passion and work with the rest of the world.