Telemachos Kanthos showed a predilection for landscape painting.  More reserved at the outset, thanks to his experiential and uninterrupted relationship with Cypriot nature he would later delve deeper and deeper into the interpretation of its character and behaviour. Kanthos’ studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts brought him into contact with the work of the plein air painters. 

Undoubtedly, the origin of Kanthos’ personal artistic pursuits lies in plein air landscape painting. He later studied the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, notably Cézanne. While still a student, he singled out the work of Konstantinos Parthenis and Konstantinos Maleas. All these artists fuelled his personal research, which was filtered through his distinctive, closely observed relationship with nature, and thus resulted in a singular artistic style.

The canvas in the A. G. Leventis Gallery Collection, View towards Morphou from Fteriki, Alona, was painted in 1965 and belongs to a particularly prolific period of Kanthos’ career, during which he gave us some of the loveliest representations and interpretations of Cypriot nature. Kanthos built his painting up with colour. He used it to draw, to create surfaces and volumes, to convey shadows and the intensities of light, to construct and compose. The work evolves rhythmically, with the tonal variations of colour and the discreet, gentle contrasts of purples and yellows, blues and oranges. The bold volumetric brushstrokes reveal the hidden geometry of space. The composition is organised diagonally with the steep slope taking up the greatest part of the painting, allowing a section of sea and sky to be seen at the back. The painter constructed the work geometrically, through the dialogue between two triangles: a larger one in the foreground, which creates the slope and is rendered in bolder colours; and a smaller one in the middle and back, which functions as the backdrop to the main subject and which, by being painted in lighter colours, appears sufficiently distant.