Outlines and Viewpoints of the pieces.

The Cretan pictures were for the main part made in the spirit of journalism.It sounds trite enough, but as a visitor, foreigner, I always was struck by the exotic look of things there, and this lasted until the last years I stayed. Crete, Heraklion, the other towns, the villages - these places are full of ready-made pictures. All a painter has to do is look and draw. By simply copying from nature, (like they told us to at school!) I put together some drawings and paintings of local scenes and people, and had an exhibition in Heraklion. Then, keeping things that simple, had two more shows.

Apart from actual scenes, there are a few imaginary ones, part painting, part cartooning which came as I stayed and got to know the place better.Some are ok, though they always fall far short of my dreams of Searledom.

All drawings are on paper that I tinted myself. I always liked the randomness of it, and it adds to the piece's integrity, somehow. I also found that if I did a drawing in ink, I couldn't pencil on site the ink up at home, I had to ink it in front of the subject otherwise a lot of nuance of the face would get lost in cartoony generalizations.

By the way, if you feel all the above would seem to warrant more actual pictures, you're right. I was late in getting this site together and this is just a part of the pieces I made while on Crete - many having been sold without me having photographed them, and are now scattered in homes in around Heraklion, and -I suppose- elsewhere. If anybody ever decides to hold a definitive exhibition, "Sacatos, the Heraklion years" he sure has his work cut out for him.

Auckland Landscapes, 2006-2009

This is a series of pictures I began on returning to New Zealand. Auckland, my home town, like a lot of the country has its geography dictated by a bunch of volcanoes -dormant, praise be. All those little mountains resulted, especially in the older parts of the city, in a very confused landscape, no town planning and a lot of very winding, hilly roads.

I thought that trying to capture those shapes, that movement would be a bit of fun, especially when you have as decoration all those post-Edwardian villas of the time, and our somewhat rampant fauna. I always put in old cars, not through any nostalgia or flag-bearing, but simply because they look good and modern cars don't. I adopted a graphic/cartoony look for these pictures and I'm never that sure where they lie on the spectrum -are they coloured drawings, true paintings or designs for posters?

For me the whole point of doing them was that I had this idea and I wanted to get it out of my system and see what they actually looked like. For anybody who feels that they are not really 'Art' (with that capital 'A') I couldn't disagree; my idea was to make feel-good look-good pictures of the city I'd seen painted so often, but never the way I wanted to see it. For the label-loving Art Public I ended up categorizing them as 'International Cartoon Gothic'.

I chose acrylic as I was painting with the dark to light classic tempera method, to which this opaque and fast-drying paint is well suited.