Elvis Presley Painting

Born in Greece, Thessaloniki, Spiros was taught portraiture and cinematographic poster art by his father Kostas Soutsos, who worked as a movie giant-poster designer in the early 1960’s. Even since his childhood, Spiros used to depict art themes that made strong impression on him, and were particularly dominated by the human element, first by sketching on paper and later by painting with watercolour and gouache. Inspired by Italian Renaissance, Baroque and Comics Pop-Art style, he started to create replicas of the Old-masters’ paintings, such as Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens and Eugène Delacroix, and reproduce drawings of famous Comics illustrators, such as John Buscema, Ernie Chan and Greek artist Spiros Ornerakis. He was also inspired by the pulp cover illustrators and heroic fantasy painters of the 1960's and 1970’s, such as Frank Frazetta, Earl Norem and Boris Vallejo. But, his greatest influence is the film poster art, due to his huge love for the classic cinema. He is a cinemagoer and a cult and classic film collector. He has been deeply influenced by the most brilliant Italian film poster designers, such as Averaldo Ciriello, Angelo Cesselon and Renato Casaro. The mixture of these influences has a special result in his painting style. In all his artwork we meet the “marriage” of realism with the movie-poster art-style. His art is full of expressiveness and is characterised by vivid colors reminiscent of the “technicolor”, the classic-cinema color system. He resides and works in Thessaloniki, Greece and many of his works are placed in several private collections all around the world.