Palassis (Vlase, Vlazio or Vlasio) Zanalis (1902–1973) arrived in Western Australia as a twelve-year-old, accompanied by an uncle, from the Greek island of Kastellorizo in 1914. Almost immediately, he began working in his uncles’ oyster saloon. In the early 1920s, he enrolled at Perth Technical School where he studied under James Linton. In the mid-1920s he began to gain commissions for portraits and personal icons from the Greek community. In the 1930s he commenced his work in churches: icons in the Greek Orthodox Church in Innisfail, Queensland, and decorations at St Sophia’s Sydney; paintings in Greek churches in Bunbury, Geraldton and West Perth and the Serbian Church in East Perth.
Meanwhile, his portrait practice thrived. In the early 1930s, ‘behind chained doors’, he painted The Birth of a Nation, measuring nearly 12 x 8 feet, which was unveiled by Sir James Mitchell in the Perth Town Hall on 1 October 1934 on the understanding that it had been accepted by the Commonwealth as a gift from the artist by way of the Perth Greek Community. ‘It will probably hang in the Library in Canberra’, reported the West Australian the next day. The Birth of a Nation, featuring a central female figure of heroic-angelic appearance, was displayed in the Fine Art Gallery on the fourth floor of Anthony Hordern’s, Sydney, in July 1935 in the course of a tour of state capitals. Its current location is unknown.
In 1939 Zanalis completed the iconostasis featuring 24 small paintings of episodes from the life of Christ, the large cross and wall murals and doors for the new Greek Orthodox church in Perth. He was a Christian Scientist himself, but iconography supplied his stable income even as he pursued his own favourite subjects: landscapes through the 1940s, and Aboriginal activities and dreamings from 1949. He claimed to have been initiated at Forrest River and to have gained permission to paint men’s ceremonies, rituals and rites, though most of his representations of Indigenous art were adapted to his own notions of composition and aesthetics. For about a decade, his paintings of landscapes and Indigenous people were reproduced on Christmas cards by John Sands Ltd. Later, he painted a series of ‘Black Madonnas’.
In 1950 he showed 50 pictures in Sydney; ultimately, he had 88 paintings on Indigenous themes on the walls of his Kalamunda studio, but he could not interest any institution in the whole collection. He appealed to Robert Edwards in 1973, writing ‘My intention is to record the life of this fast vanishing race, and I happen to the be the only artist in the Commonwealth who has penetrated into their life and secret ceremonies.’ Edwards (inaugural chair of the board of the National Portrait Gallery) wrote ‘Seldom has an artist portrayed with such feelings the Aboriginal people of Australia . . . [recording] on canvas their character and inner emotions. I am really very impressed by his work.’ However, despite several exhibitions at which the paintings were offered for sale, few were taken off his hands and at last his widow Molly donated 33 paintings to the University of Western Australia and eleven to Curtin University. Zanalis ceased to earn his livelihood from his art in 1967. Vlase Zanalis, Greek–Australian Artist by John Yiannakis and Neville Green was published by Latrobe University Press in 2003.
