By Kieran Tapsell of Banksia Bushcare
When the Suez Canal was being built in the 1850s, many Greeks were brought in as labourers and tradesmen. After the completion of the canal in 1869, many of them stayed in Egypt. However, after the Suez Crisis in 1956, the then President Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the Greeks, despite many of them having lived there for several generations. Emmanuel and George Theodossiou, brothers in their early 20s, were among the refugees.
Emmanuel came to Australia, and his brother, George, got a job with an international organisation and went to East Africa. The brothers kept in contact by aerograms (remember those?). When George wrote to Emmanuel in Australia, he had a local artist paint a picture on the envelope. Emmanuel, in the meantime, married in Australia and had three daughters, one of whom is Tina Mucci, a Stanwell Park resident for many years, now at Wombarra and the widow of the much-loved and missed artist, Michael Mucci.
Once when I was at one of the many Mucci family gatherings, Manny, now 95, showed me these aerogram envelopes with their exquisite East African paintings. He allowed me to scan them, and then I painted them on ceramics for him, including some of the eggs for Art in the Park in the Stanwell Avenue Reserve.
I had no idea who painted the originals and neither did Manny. But this is where AI comes in. I downloaded the scanned envelopes onto ChatGPT and asked it to identify the artists. It replied that there were signatures on two of them, Karecha and Saidi, and they were street artists from East Africa. They never became famous as artists but plied their trade amongst the tourists and residents of the Congo, amongst whom was the avid letter writer, George Theodossiou.
Banksia Bushcare is now exhibiting the Karecha and Saidi paintings transferred onto eggs for the enjoyment of those strolling through the Stanwell Avenue Reserve. They are part of the MATE Exhibitions (Modern Art Tributes on Eggs).
No doubt Karecha and Saidi have long since left this mortal coil, but their paintings are now exhibited along a funny little dirt track on the other side of the world. It is a shame they don’t know about it but, who knows, maybe they do.
