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June 16, 2009

Art competition winner makes big impression

By Cate Lecuyer

BEVERLY — When Polyvios Christoforos was a kid, his mother, Georgia, always kept a pad of paper in her pocketbook.

She'd hand it to him when he was bored or needed something to do to keep quiet.

"Every spare moment he had, he was drawing," she said. "He always had this passion for art since he was little."

Christoforos, a high-functioning autistic student at Northshore Academy at McKeown, won this year's Sixth District Congressional Art Competition and Exhibition. The juried show, sponsored by Congressman John Tierney, included 57 works by public and private high school students in his district.

Christoforos' acrylic painting, called "Dusk at the Acropolis," was shipped to Washington, D.C., and will be on display for the next year in the Cannon Tunnel, a popular, sloping hallway that leads from the Cannon House Office Building to the Capitol Building. The exhibit will also include more than 420 other pieces, which represent the winners from nearly every congressional district in the country. Christoforos, a senior from Salem, will fly to D.C. later this month for a reception.

Two of his other paintings will be hung up in the Salem post office and the main branch of the Peabody post office. But for years, they've decorated the walls at his mother's restaurant, Brothers Roast Beef & Seafood in Peabody.

"I'm so proud of him and his accomplishments," Georgia Christoforos said, tears welling up in her eyes. "What a breakthrough."

She and her son heard about the contest at the last minute through the North Shore Arc, a Danvers nonprofit that provides services to disabled people and their families.

Peter Flister, co-director of North Shore Arc's ArcWorks! program, which fosters art among people with disabilities, found out about the competition just after noon the day entries were due. The deadline was at 4 p.m. He and co-director Suzanne Ryan grabbed Christoforos' painting, which was in the building, and met up with his mother at Brothers, where they quickly filled out the paperwork and rushed to enter Christoforos in the contest.

"This all happened so serendipitously," Flister said. "It was one last-minute phone call. It was destiny."

The painting was something Christoforos did about two years ago, from a picture taken during a family trip to Greece.

"The best part of the painting," he said, "is the color mixtures and the technique involved."

He said he really liked the composition and concentrated on the colors — the orange sunset in the background, complemented by a blue-purple foreground.

Indeed, the painting struck the three judges as the work of someone talented beyond his age.

"It was almost like it was done by somebody 20 years older finally getting a grasp on Impressionist art," said Josh Megysey, owner of Mingo Gallery and a judge for the past four years.

"You see a lot of pieces from kids in high school that are very detail-oriented and excellent, but you rarely see somebody who can understand this style of painting and composition."

Megysey said the bold colors also caught his eye.

"He was able to use bright colors to bring out shadow and light. It had all this depth that takes people years of studying to grasp," Megysey said. "And he just seemed to have it."

Staff writer Cate Lecuyer can be reached at clecuyer@salemnews.com.

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Art competition winner makes big impression
by By Cate Lecuyer , , Tue Jun 16, 2009, 10:10 AM EDT
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